Juliancolton

42F by the river in PK and 28F at the house. Different worlds a few miles apart.

US 44 between Millbrook and North Canaan is a beautiful route any time of year. It's sort of a trip to the past as one drives through the little communities that time left behind. With the exception of a few convenience stores, you won't find any retail chains in Millerton, Millerton, Salisbury, etc... just old-fashioned hardware stores, original diners, little B&Bs. It's charming. These villages are very interested in maintaining that aesthetic by controlling who can open up. With the new rail trails, hiking trails, state and local parks, and other attractions along that corridor, it's a pretty under-appreciated part of the region IMO. I've been in Millbrook 19 years now and it's the same as it ever was. Quite literally indistinguishable from 2001 in almost all respects. I find it comforting in a way.

Just rain here, any snow that may have fallen is long gone. 2020 will 2020...

HRRR and NAM ticked quite a bit warmer in southern parts of the WWA area. I'm starting to get that too-familiar winter 2019-20 feeling (you know the one). For posterity, point forecast is 3-7" tonight and 1-2" tomorrow.

Yeah, reopening needs to happen sooner than later if people are to stay in business. I just wonder whether the official lifting of shutdown will be enough to stop the bleeding. Hopefully most people are comfortable going out to eat, going to the mall, visiting specialty shops, etc. with reasonable precautions. There's gonna be a lot of soul-searching and hand-wringing in the coming months and years, to be sure. I'll have no problem sitting down for dinner in a clean restaurant or buying clothes in roomy stores, but will I ever feel totally at ease again spending a Saturday afternoon shopping at Woodbury? Hard to say... Count me in. When this is all over, socializing > everything else Back to all rain here. The southerly flow up the valley is doing me no favors.

I ended up getting a burger to go from the local gastropub... pretty depressing scenes. Tables stacked in the corner, designated standing area 6 feet from the bar while paying, special receptacle for "used" pens awaiting disinfecting. I'm sure they must be doing some tenuous business, else it wouldn't be worth staying open, but it really hits home how badly these places are suffering. That joint is swamped on a normal Friday from early afternoon to the wee hours, and now you have a few stragglers sheepishly ambling through the door over the course of the night. Terrible. Anyway, white rain here at 34/33. Looks like this is going to be entirely dependent on rates. Needs to come down faster than it can melt.

I just tried to order Chinese takeout and they said at least a two hour wait, LOL. Time to go trap snowshoe hares or something, I guess.

41/29 with a touch of drizzle. Little more concerned about low-level temps than I was this afternoon.

I've really been pining for some prolonged warm wx lately, but there's no question that I'm enjoying tracking a frozen precip event one last time. Almost offers a little sense of normalcy. 2.9" gets me my biggest snowfall since Dec 11th. That 19-week drought isn't toooo much shorter than the presumed off-season. I think that's a decent total to shoot for up here before the 900mb level torches around midnight. The potential really goes up with even just a bit more latitude and elevation. 6-8" not out of the question up near the tri-point around Millerton and Salisbury.

A healthy coating of snow here this morning.

1) model wind gust output is a joke; 2) I stockpiled about 100 gals of gas for my generator right before the shutdown started, so bring it on!

Good, old-fashioned April showers here. Relaxing in a way, though I wouldn't have minded a little thunder or small hail for extra pizzazz. Final flakes of the season tonight/early tomorrow?

That offshore system has been showing some hybrid characteristics over the last 30 hours or so, at times developing a ring of convection around a relatively clear eye-feature. Forecast phase diagrams foresee the warm core becoming a little deeper and more symmetrical as the storm retreats southward toward the relatively warm waters of the Gulf Stream. I doubt the NHC will acknowledge the potential for subtropical transition, but it's fun to watch as we wait for more unambiguous tropical threats.

A rather intense lightning show visible to my NNE from the line of storms in Columbia/Rensselaer counties. Dry here. Edit: little cell cycled up and moved overhead, nice early spring thunderstorm.

Ticks scare me more than all the bears, bobcats, and coyotes combined that I see out in the woods every year. Freakin' abominations.

Still all sleet here. I suspect it'll flip when those heavier echoes move overhead

0.9" from round 1 here.

This is my take as well. Retailers throw out an unfathomable amount of food 99% of the year to make sure supply is there at crunch time. Most people did their big wholesale hauls two weeks ago and are getting back into a normal-ish grocery buying routine, so with pantries full and money increasingly tight for just about everyone, you probably won't see folks singlehandedly clearing out entire aisles from this point on. The food supply chain is resilient. If certain items start running low, reasonable facsimiles will quickly take their places. And while I'm obviously a big home gardening dude, I'm under no delusions that I'd be able to sustain even myself for very long just on home veggies. Potatoes are one's best bet considering yield per acre and nutritional value - you could survive for 6-8 weeks just on potatoes before mineral deficiencies caught up with you. That said, they aren't fool-proof to grow and can be rather unreliable from season to season. Plus, if we ever get to the point of all-out famine in this country, there'd be a lot of other problems that few of us would be equipped to deal with.

Cool wx stuff could be ok pretty soon, but I never plant anything tender out until May 1st with strong consensus for a warm pattern at that juncture. Not wise to bet on no freezes in April, even in the torchiest winters. Even if I were confident enough to plant annuals a month early, I'd still rather wait until the traditional mid-May with how many pests and diseases we have to deal with these days. Impatiens and tomatoes are ravaged by blight before August even with a normal planting schedule.

Bastard.

It seems like our window for climbing into the 70s is closing. Maybe a brief shot of mugginess just before the fropa.

There was nothing left OTG here by around 8. The cocorahs observer down the road logged 0.7", so I guess I'll use that for my records.

Where are you seeing this?

Looking forward to apologies from everyone who rushed to blame "careless city people"... I have no idea if there's any way to prevent a train from doing that or even recognize that it's happening in real-time. It stinks though. Some of my favorite trails will probably be closed for a good long while.

Jeez, this is bonkers (photo by Dave Rocco on facebook)