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The March 5-7 White Lion Obs/Nowcasting Thread


Ji

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Cantore did this like 8 times in the 1990s and early 2000s. Went to a place supposed to be under a death band with 12-15". Made excuses about why he couldn't manage to get 1".

 

nobody thought dc was getting huge snow until like 1030 last night .. well, there were a few wishcasts early

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That red orange spot on the radar has been sitting on top of eastern Sussex county DE and Ocean City MD for over an hour.  They must be getting drowned.  Light rain here in western Sussex with plenty of wind.

 

I was just looking at that, too.  Is anybody under that?  I am starting to wonder if there is not sleet or wet snow mixing in there and making those returns so bright.  

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I was just looking at that, too.  Is anybody under that?  I am starting to wonder if there is not sleet or wet snow mixing in there and making those returns to bright.  

 

Hearing that most of OC is without power.

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I think too many forgot about climo and fact it's March. Though we did get that early March storm in 2009, reading  Ian's story on Capital Weather shows only 3 March storms of at least 5 inches in the last 50 years in DC. Nearly all top March storms were a long, long time ago, when much of DC area was largely a farming community.  

 

Even if we had gotten under a few heavy bands today of 1 to 2 inches an hour,  and got down a few degrees cooler, much of the snow probably would have  melted from underneath in the urban heat island.  Even in Feb 2010, DC lost some snow on the night of Feb. 5 as well as during the initial wave of the Feb. 10 blizzard due to more melting than many had expected.

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/30/AR2011013004449.html

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To this day, I swear I was robbed of a good 5 to 6 inches of snow that was melting on contact -- even with a base on the ground -- on the evening of Feb. 5 2010. And I was in elevated Upper Northwest, not even in the warmer Downtown.  Few believe that, but from 8 to 10 p.m. on that night,  while snow was piling up like mad in the suburbs, seemed the city was still too warm.   Can only imagine what today would have been like.

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Probably not, but my point was if this setup was in Jan or Feb, we'd be looking at big snows.

IAD got .93 and BWI got .73. Unless it was 10 degrees outside and we had > 10:1 ratios, thats 9" and 7". Not exactly HECS. Both the GFS and NAM were way off with QPF. I think the euro was pretty close, but I have no idea how it verified with the storm formation. 

 

Especially since those precip totals are over 15 hours. There was no "thump" with this storm.

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Sorry for you DC / BWI folks.  Last night I gave in to my inner weenie and allowed myself to think this was going to be an epic area-wide event. 

 

 

Tale of two storms: the first waa portion was great for us (10" imby), but the coastal was an outright disaster (4.5 hours of light snow netted negative 4 inches and lots of wind). 

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Correction: We have light to moderate steady RAIN, a wind driven RAIN.

 

I'm enjoying this comma head rainfall so much. It's sticking everywhere, on the roads, the sidewalk, the fence, the bushes, and even rain on top of snow! This is going to be epic.

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Lessons learned for next winter: models are far from infallible, especially on the fringes of winter.  People here say it all the time, but models are tools, not answers. 

 

I think a lot of factors mixed in here.  Although there was plenty of poo-pooing about it here yesterday, I can't help but think if we'd been a few degrees cooler yesterday, the precip starts earlier and accumulates at least marginally faster overnight.  The ocean likely was also simply too warm, and with a marginal airmass when the coastal transfer happened, it was too much to overcome.

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