Snow, ice, slop, rain and gusts to 50 mph expected Sunday into Monday in the Philly region

A dash of snow, perhaps some icing, rain, and winds gusting as high as 50 mph at the Shore were due in the region late Sunday into Monday from a potent winter storm that has layered snow on the Midwest, threatens to ice parts of the South, and might even affect the Eagles’ playoff game.

The National Weather Service has posted a winter weather advisory for potential icing for the city’s neighboring Pennsylvania counties, save for Lower Bucks County. A wind advisory was in effect at the Shore from 6 p.m. Sunday to 6 a.m. Monday, and with an assist from the full moon, coastal flooding was a concern with Monday night’s tide.

However, any frozen precipitation likely would be short-lived, forecasters said. And the fact that the threat of any significant snow — despite the most vigorous cold spell of the season — has been all but erased, is testimony to the storm’s potency, said Bob Larson, senior meteorologist with AccuWeather Inc., in State College.

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Temperatures were forecast to drop to 12 in the city and deep into single digits to the north and west, but the storm evidently won’t be impressed.

“It’s hard to believe with how cold and dry it is ... that it’s going to be really not even close in terms of getting a significant snow event out of this,” said Jonathan O’Brien, meteorologist at the weather service office in Mount Holly.

The storm is forecast to rout the Arctic air mass, although residual cold air at the surface might lead to some icing before the precipitation liquifies completely, said O’Brien.

The storm’s center is forecast to track near Harrisburg, said Larson, and as it moves north the counterclockwise winds will draw in warm air from the Atlantic on winds from the east and southeast.

In the last few days, computer runs consistently have nudged the storm path — and the all-snow line —westward. “The more intense these things get the more they want to pull west,” said Larson. In this case longitude will trump latitude.

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For snow, “It’s a function of east-west, not north-south. All the way to Portland, Maine, it’s going to change to rain.” By contrast, a foot or more is possible in Pittsburgh and Erie.

The storm comes with an impressive resume. Over a foot of snow was measured in Des Moines, and the weather service has posted warnings for snow and ice in the Carolinas, where mass power outages were possible.

In advance of snow and ice nearly 1,000 flights within the U.S. have already been canceled for Sunday, according to the flight tracking site flightaware.com, which tracks flight cancellations.

The storm was forecast to lift toward New England late Sunday into Monday, and most of Martin Luther King Day could be dry around here, although some light, back-end snow was possible, forecasters say, and strong winds gusting to 30 mph would persist.

By Sunday afternoon, the Tampa, Fla., area will be in the storm’s wake and 30-mph-plus gusts are forecast to whip across Raymond James Stadium, where the Tampa Bay Buccaneers will host the Eagles in a playoff game. But the rains are expected to shut off by noon, an hour before kickoff.

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Serious cold could return to Philadelphia late in the workweek, Larson said, perhaps rivaling that of Saturday’s, with at least a chance of some snow during the weekend.

This holiday weekend, however, snow lovers won’t have their desires requited, despite the deep chill. AccuWeather’s Larson says he knows the feeling.

“As a kid growing up in the Philly area who was a snow lover,” he said, “these were the kind of storms that would be frustrating as heck. It would be so cold in advance of the storm, I’d hear the forecast. I thought, ‘It’s going down to 10 tonight,’ it’s not going to turn to rain.

“It did.”