Ger

I am really, incredibly, terribly interested in it snowing in D.C. Small or moderate snowfalls will do. I don't expect regular winters of 30+ inches like folks living in winter wonderlands such as Philadelphia and New York might expect! No, no, no, no, no...I've limited my expectations to occasional snowfalls each year, with a big one about every five, and lots of fruitless model watching in between.

Since I started watching the weather back in 1995, when I was 10 (where HAVE the years gone), I've experienced the following, truly memorable snowfalls (or snowfall debacles): memorable for the amount of snow received or for the amount of egg left on my face when nothing happened.

1/1996

Duh! The Blizzard of '96 and the storm that really got me revved for weather in general, snow in particular. Even back then, when I knew barely a thing about snow and blizzards and how they form, etc., I knew as soon as I heard the awful pings that accumulations would suffer. That is the day I came to HATE sleet, a hate that I still possess so deeply to this very day. 20" + 2-3" IP in Upper Marlboro, MD. Would have been quite a bit more snow if it hadn't sleeted during the most ferocious period of the whole storm- when bands swept in from the east as the storm wrapped up. I'm still sick over it. 30" easy.

1-or-2/1996

It was after the blizzard and it came somewhat unexpectedly. I think it was a clipper that developed a secondary off the coast and strengthened unexpectedly fast and deep, turning a predicted low-level storm warning event into a whopper that dropped close to a foot at my house. 9-12" in Upper Marlboro, MD

3/1998

Clipper on steroids. I got lucky and ended up under one of the deformation bands that stretched from around IAD to my location in central Prince Georges. I remember this being one of the few times I actually played in the snow. 8-10" in Upper Marlboro, MD.

1/2000

Wish I had been around on these forums back then, if there even were any, as this one would have been a hoot to watch unfold. I very vividly remember watching the Weather Channel (a channel I spent several hours a day watching in the winter months in the late nineties) and being told the snowstorm that at one time seemed possible, in fact wasn't going to happen, that it would stay suppressed (I'm still skeptical of storms that are supposed to stay suppressed to this day-- I blame this storm) and exit the southeast coast: I don't know whether it was divine intervention or just foolhardy hope that paid off. I think it was a little bit of both. Along with model error, etc. But I flipped on the weather channel at about ten till ten, saw the scroll at the bottom describing the WSW and the terrific amounts (for a surprise storm) expected, and next turned to Fox 5 news @ 10 to catch Sue Palka's stunned reaction; she was literally lost for words. I still have a special, nostalgic place for her because of her dumbfounded performance that night. All in all she did a good job exhorting the magnitude of storm on such short notice and did her best to gird viewers for the next eventful day. I stayed up all night waiting for it to start, finally fell asleep, woke up around 7a to SN that quickly became +SN and lasted the whole day clear through 11p that night. Not a ping of sleet. The radar looked sweet over my house in east central Prince Georges as a steady train of deformation bands formed and strengthened overhead; the bands traveled almost due north from Raleigh to my house east of D.C. clear to Syracuse, NY (a result of the negative-tilt the storm took). I must admit that I too enjoyed a little schadenfreude at the expense of New Yorkers (from the city: I'd already identified them as competitors for snow). Not understanding the complexities of weather, I was a bit incredulous at watching snow pile up outside while a place some two hundred miles to my north saw rain. But Paul Kocin explained quite well how the negative-tilt had drawn in warm ocean air and switched precipitation over to rain/sleet, and I could see for myself on radar the massive dry slot they'd have to contend with after they'd cooled off. Kocin drew a circle around the areas he expected to see the greatest totals. My house in Upper Marlboro was comfortably within the confines of that circle. 16-18" in Upper Marlboro, MD.

12/2001

Revenge of the New Yorkers. Went to bed to a winter storm warning, though I was skeptical as I'd had a look at radar and didn't like what I was seeing: rather spotty moisture moving west-to-east just above the M/D line, never once sinking below. I'd end up seeing different variations of that same general radar look quite often in the ensuing four or five years. Woke up to the clearest, sunniest skies I'd ever seen while NYC and especially its suburbs dug out from a doozy. I chalked this one up to having gotten that big one back in 1/2000 while NYC lost out to WAA and a dry slot. Still, bitter pill to swallow. I hated Miller Bs from this day forward, having only recently become neutral toward them. The few occasions they do produce snowfall south of 40N, they're interesting to watch because of their explosive nature and intense banding (I'm thinking the second storm of 2/2010). Plus I think we may be entering a period of long-term negative NAO, which would help DC/Baltimore cash in on Bs if the block is strong enough to force the ULL below our latitude, or displace secondary coastal development further south from the VA capes to off the NC or SC coast.

3/2001

I was never sold on this storm and thank goodness I wasn't. Biggest. Fail. Ever. My only memory is of watching the weather channel and its incredible shrinking accumulations map: the first one had VA to ME colored in pretty dark purples indicating totals well over a foot (little arrows pointed at D.C., another pointed at toward PHL and NYC, yet another at Boston, each one indicating the potential for up to 3'+); the second illustration shrunk accumulations further inland and tapered off from the south, ousting most of Virginia from the cataclysmic triple-phaser; in the third correction off went the purple from the D.C./Baltimore area. Each subsequent map ate away at the whole of the coastal northeast until at last a (accurate, it turned out) prediction for a moderate snowfall in NYC was arrived at, with even less toward PHL, snow showers for Baltimore and, if you were fortunate, flurries in D.C.; SNE saw a solid amount, as did eastern Long Island, but what fell was hardly comparable to very recent, very sensationalist projections of just days before. NNE and upstate NY received historic accumulations, but that came as no surprise as the climatology for those areas supported heavy snowfalls in late winter.

2/2003

I was sold on this baby several days out. All the models showed it with their usual waffling about how far north it would go, temperatures, etc.: the latter would come back to haunt me as Upper Marlboro saw the switch over to a dreadful mixed bag of mostly sleet around 4p, continuing past 9p, before finally switching back to all snow and ending a couple hours later. By this time I was reading and occasionally posting at Wright-Weather where I first began seeing some of the same folks I see posting to this very day (HM, Wxrisk, brettjrob, some annoying kid from Connecticut). I remember being jealous about those areas that didn't succumb to WAA, basically all those north of a line from BWI to Columbia to IAD. I was proud as a peacock when Baltimore broke it's record and established the new one: 28.2". We did not-so-bad in Upper Marlboro, MD at 21-23". If not for sleet we might have easily topped the number at Baltimore.

2/2006

After a substantial drought, a never-ending parade of Miller Bs bombing in the Long Island Sound, and the "pleasure" of watching the NYC crowd rack up one 40" winter after the next, things finally came together for a big storm in February 2006. As fate would have it, I had decided to spend the night with a friend in Columbia, MD, in central Maryland, an area which, after NYC and its immediate metro (SW CT, NE NJ in particular), was the location of very heavy accumulations from the storm (central MD, north-central MD, and north-east MD). I drifted off to bed that night having lost some faith in the storm, as it had already lifted north of our latitude by the time it began to undergo bombogenesis off the NJ coast. I was stunned out my sleep by clap of thunder and looked out the window to pouring snow. Apparently, the bombing low pressure had sent waves of Atlantic moisture down its tentacles that reached back to northern Virginia (where the 12"+ accumulations generally began). Meanwhile, explosive deepening slowed the system to a virtual standstill, allowing for Columbia, MD, located as it was under a near-stationary deformation band, to experience several hours of +SN as the storm slowly exited off the Northeast coast. Had the storm bombed out as it lifted past the Virginia Capes or Ocean City, MD, the banding combined with stalling might have allowed for incredible totals in the deformation zone. As things occurred, that band was further north into SW CT and NE NJ as well as NYC (Manhattan). In Columbia, we did exceptionally well in finding ourselves in a peripheral deformation zone. At my friend's house about a mile north of Columbia Town Center, there was 22-24". Almost all of which had melted by around 4p later that day (the snow stopped around 7 or 8a; skies cleared and temperatures rose hastily that morning into the 50s and 60s). Back home in Upper Marlboro, where no deformation band had set up, snowfall was mostly the result of disorganized precipitation bolstered by energy from the coastal. The total was substantially less than in Columbia, around 7-9". A spotter in Bowie, MD, about a mile ENE, recorded less at 6". East-central Prince Georges did very poorly, as did a corresponding area stretching due west to DCA through Alexandria and Arlington and portions of Fairfax to IAD. Area-wide the mean/median was around 8-12" in Washington and its immediate suburbs to 13-16" in the Baltimore metro. BWI recorded 13", which was typical for north-central Anne Arundel, while much of Howard, Carroll, Harford, and Baltimore counties saw in excess of 15", and in certain areas in excess of 20" (all of Carroll, northwest and northern Baltimore, northwest and northern Harford, central and northern Howard).