gymengineer

Some, maybe. But, I and some others who have experienced both storms and posted in the thread already don't think '96 is a slam-dunk winner over 2/10. It depends, as always, on location and your priorities in a storm.

I am only in my 30's, and I've experienced five 20"+ snowstorms (2/83, 1/96, 2/03, 12/09, 2/10) in lower Montgomery County, MD. Someone who died the year that I was born, even if he/she lived until age 100, would have only experienced two such storms in the same location.

I can't choose between 1/96 and 2/5-6/10. I experienced both in the same house in Potomac, MD. 1/96: more road accumulation-- there was no way to drive out of the neighborhood until the plows came, whereas in 2/10, we were able to use the tire tracks from early in the storm to form a driving trail two days after the storm before the plows came; colder; higher drifts 2/10: more snow (26.5" vs. 24"); higher overall impact because we lost power for 30 hours (and unlike after Isabel, we couldn't drive to some place with power during the outage); higher snowfall rates The winds were equal in both (gusts to around 40 mph during the fiercest part).

I went to undergrad in the Boston area, so I always root for the city for huge snowstorms. Any idea why the NWS latest warning text (1 to 2 ft, locally more) is completely out of range from the latest snowfall map (24-36", 29" being the "most likely" amount for Boston)? They were released at almost the same time.

It wasn't just more snow--- it was windier by quite a bit too. I think many remember the heavy, wet nature of the snow foremost, but the wind was what a lot of you all commented on *during* the event: http://www.easternuswx.com/bb/index.php?/topic/223324-dcvamdwv-hecs-obs-and-discussion-ii/ http://www.easternuswx.com/bb/index.php?/topic/223380-dcvamdwv-hecs-obs-and-discussion-iii/ DCA was windier during the height of 2/5-6/10 than during any phase of 1/96.

I know calendar months are kind of arbitrary cut-offs when looking at snow, but this is the first winter on record with 3 months recording >10" of snow at IAD.

There are minor annoying rounding issues-- stuff like 7.99" of snow instead of 8.0" or 33.1 F instead of 33 F---that need to be scrubbed out of a spreadsheet, but those should be relatively easy to fix. I just don't get the point of why they would have used the metric converted values to convert back to "English," instead of just using the original "English" values.

It was fewer steps to get the data. Also, it didn't have the weird conversion to metric then converted back to "English" units and there were many more co-ops to access. The revamp allows you to only access currently active co-ops, it looks like.

Utah State Climate site-- http://climate.usurf.usu.edu/mapGUI/mapGUI.php The new interface is less user friendly, but you can still figure it out, I'm sure.

lol...I don't see enough of your posts to know what your overall viewpoint on this is whereas I just happened to recall his general posture in this type of discussion. That's really all..and now he has answered my question.

Well I responded to your post because you seem to have very little patience for all the "what can be improved?" types of discussion. It really was just a question....and now you have clarified your answer. Thank you.

Ok,but you were agreeing with a post saying that people are just failing to accept that life sucks and crap happens. That's why I asked-- because by having service assessments in the first place, the organization is taking a position that there are improvements to be made to the service, and that we don't just have to accept that this tragedy should have happened in the way that it did.

Would you go as far as to say the recommendations in the service assessment are not valid then?

The aerial views starting around 1:06 are reminiscent of Teton '87 and the PA forest tornadoes '85.. although maybe not as wide as those monsters.

If you can get past the cheesy soundtrack, this video chronicles the storm from start to finish. My favorite part is between 1:05 and 1:45. So beautiful!

Midnight magic Two great time lapses:

We are all too disheartened this winter to even reminisce. Then I was young and unafraid.. And dreams were made and used and wasted There was no ransom to be paid No song unsung no wine untasted

Not that it matters, since the other map was just fine for an initial accumulation forecast, but this map wasn't posted until after the snow had already started. I mean, at that point, it's kind of an update rather than a forecast.

The only reason that I knew this was an earthquake pretty soon was that I experienced a 7.3 magnitude earthquake in Taiwan (11/14/1986). That earthquake woke me up and caused substantial, but scattered, damage across Taipei including some collapsed buildings. The shake from today's quake felt almost as strong and seemed longer than the Taiwan one. It was definitely cool to experience this earthquake with someone else who could nerd about it at the same time. I was conducting an introductory meeting with an Earth Science teacher when it happened. I asked her as the shaking started "Does this happen often in your building?" thinking that there was a nearby passing train. Then, when the shaking continued and intensified, we both realized it was an earthquake and stood up to look around the room. That's when that jolt that we all experienced happened, with the split-second thought of "If this gets any stronger, the building will begin to collapse." After it was over, she was giddy and said that one of her "bucket list" items just got crossed off. As the shaking died down, we began to guess at the epicenter and actually discussed the historic eastern quakes. I guessed a IV-V Mercalli intensity, but we didn't think it was a New Madrid quake as the shaking wasn't a rolling motion and didn't last >1 minute. We started talking about Charleston, SC, or maybe even Cape Ann/Boston. Somehow, we managed to finish our meeting, and then I was able to listen to WTOP in my car about where the earthquake epicenter was actually located.

The report implies at least spots of EF5 damage through that entire F5 band on the google map created by the Springfield office, which was much-discussed in this thread. While I agree with Josh that likely there wasn't that large a region of solid EF5 damage as literally depicted on the map (probably hard for them to acutally separate out the EF4 damage from the EF5 damage), it's still an incredible/unbelievable tornado that would cause consistently found instances of EF5 damage along such a long stretch. That's in contrast to the more usual scenario where like 5 houses receiving F5 damage can be isolated to a particular neighborhood.

You haven't been paying attention then.....without needing to do any outside research, just click back in this very thread and read the updates every single day.

Well, the locations that carry the "low-end" descriptor were never part of the most intense damage region from the original detailed survey, when the tornado was still rated a preliminary EF4. The quotes from the article also imply that more intense damage was to the east of the hospital area. I'd like to see the whole report, which is not up yet on the Springfield office website. I guess the newspaper got to see a draft version?

Unfortunately, for tornadoes, as a couple of mets have pointed out, there is no central body like the NHC doing these wind estimates. So wind estimates from event to event (by different offices) aren't going to be directly comparable-- at least not yet. Maybe someday in the future, there will be a "re-analysis" panel that will then compare these events to each other directly; I don't know that there will be a big push for that to happen though, since these ratings inherently carry a level of subjectivity with factors that the raters just will never know (from exact construction standards to even things like was the garage door open or closed, etc.).

Check back at the survey map page-- the Springfield office has attempted a preliminary damage contour map. It's hard for me to see on my computer screen if there is an additional darker shade inside the EF4 swath.... it looks that way, but the "darker" shade is almost indistinguishable to my eyes. Can the rest of you see it more clearly? ETA: The "5" markers are still there in the same locations.

Yeah, I read that massive thread after the Tuscaloosa tornado about what advice to give on-air.... I don't have a strong opinion on this since I don't have stats to analyze on the topic, but just wanted to point out the difference in phrasing between the KFOR weatherman and the Birmingham weatherman (James Spann, was it?). As for the storm speed factor, that was discussed in the Service Assessment for the Super Tuesday outbreak that I linked above.