New England snowstorm memories.

[jamesnichols1989]

One that's not in my top five in terms of snowstorms is the December 9th 2005 bomb, that delivered 100-120mph gusts to the Cape Cod, MA area.

[Tropopause_Fold]

One that's not in my top five in terms of snowstorms is the December 9th 2005 bomb, that delivered 100-120mph gusts to the Cape Cod, MA area.

so...do you live on the Cape?

[CT Rain]

Just looked through the Feb blizzard thread and downloaded all the level 2 radar data from the peak of the event.

 

Insane. 

 

What a storm. 

[CT Rain]

wtf was going on over S CT. 

 

That was the fun monster aggregate/sleet/small hail combination in the convection. I love how it's snowing south of OKX in the Atlantic ocean and it's all mixed up in S CT from East Lyme to HVN. I'm guessing you had some latent heat release screwing around with ptype in low levels and also probably had enough upright convection to result in some hail development. 

[ORH_wxman]

wtf was going on over S CT. 

 

That was the fun monster aggregate/sleet/small hail combination in the convection. I love how it's snowing south of OKX in the Atlantic ocean and it's all mixed up in S CT from East Lyme to HVN. I'm guessing you had some latent heat release screwing around with ptype in low levels and also probably had enough upright convection to result in some hail development. 

 

 

Its almost impossible to reconcile hail with the thermal profiles the way they were. Especially since we had seeder-feeder from above...but the OKX sounding from 00z Feb 9th does temps approaching near 0C at around 900mb (the sounding craps out above that)...the lift must have been so powerful (like straight strong convection) to lift the supercooled droplets in the low levels to form low-level RA/ZR that then got lifted into colder sounding above.

[grinch1989]

wtf was going on over S CT. 

 

That was the fun monster aggregate/sleet/small hail combination in the convection. I love how it's snowing south of OKX in the Atlantic ocean and it's all mixed up in S CT from East Lyme to HVN. I'm guessing you had some latent heat release screwing around with ptype in low levels and also probably had enough upright convection to result in some hail development. 

 

I clearly remember a sleet/hail/graupel mix with the snow for about 30 minutes.  During this it was probably  50% mix 50% snow. but conditions were still near whiteout with the intensity it was all falling at.  We all know the sad site when visibility improves when sleet mixes in, this was nothing like that.

[HalloweenGale]

The winter of '95/'96 was really something down here on the Cape (I was living out on ACK Island with my mother at the time, hey I was 7 years old.)

 

One of my favorites from that winter: March 2nd.

 

BOS: 3.9"

ORH: 6"

HYA: 8"

Lowell: 6"(?)

Haverhill: 5.5"

Ashfield: 7"

Edgartown: 6"

Plymouth: 8"

 

There was a WINDEX event the following day.

[CT Rain]

Its almost impossible to reconcile hail with the thermal profiles the way they were. Especially since we had seeder-feeder from above...but the OKX sounding from 00z Feb 9th does temps approaching near 0C at around 900mb (the sounding craps out above that)...the lift must have been so powerful (like straight strong convection) to lift the supercooled droplets in the low levels to form low-level RA/ZR that then got lifted into colder sounding above.

 

Yeah that's what I'm thinking. The met here from Clinton was reporting giant sleet (all ice/not soft hail or graupel) that was as big as peas. We had a bunch of reports of that and also reports of rain as far north as Essex. 

 

Seems to me the lift was so great in the 0-6kft layer and there was upright convection ongoing you were able to develop small hail (or sleet that was lofted/suspended in an updraft and grew) which is just remarkable. 

 

The RAP BUFKIT soundings for GON and HVN at were all subfreezing (by a fairly substantial margin) in the 00z-02z time frame so I'm not sure how else to explain it.

 

As for the rain I think the convection was so vigorous the latent heat release was messing with low level thermal profiles and developing pockets of >32F air where you wouldn't normally expect to see them.

 

If anyone as a chance to look at the dual pol data from that storm it is absolutely fascinating. I have it all on GR but I don't think I'm able to save a loop of it. 

[Brian5671]

There was some minor sleet here, but it was only for 15 minutes-I think we were on the western edge of where it sleeted, which makes sense since the best lift was over me and to my east.

[Ginx snewx]

Yeah that's a meltdown lol....bile of 12/30/00...

Meanwhile we were rocking like no tomorrow, I love it when you call me Rev Poppa...

[CoastalWx]

Yeah that's what I'm thinking. The met here from Clinton was reporting giant sleet (all ice/not soft hail or graupel) that was as big as peas. We had a bunch of reports of that and also reports of rain as far north as Essex. 

 

Seems to me the lift was so great in the 0-6kft layer and there was upright convection ongoing you were able to develop small hail (or sleet that was lofted/suspended in an updraft and grew) which is just remarkable. 

 

The RAP BUFKIT soundings for GON and HVN at were all subfreezing (by a fairly substantial margin) in the 00z-02z time frame so I'm not sure how else to explain it.

 

As for the rain I think the convection was so vigorous the latent heat release was messing with low level thermal profiles and developing pockets of >32F air where you wouldn't normally expect to see them.

 

If anyone as a chance to look at the dual pol data from that storm it is absolutely fascinating. I have it all on GR but I don't think I'm able to save a loop of it. 

 

I also read that ZDR that high in combo with low CC might point to a melting layer. That's unbelievable. What a beast.

[Mr. Windcredible!]

Yeah that's what I'm thinking. The met here from Clinton was reporting giant sleet (all ice/not soft hail or graupel) that was as big as peas. We had a bunch of reports of that and also reports of rain as far north as Essex. 

 

Seems to me the lift was so great in the 0-6kft layer and there was upright convection ongoing you were able to develop small hail (or sleet that was lofted/suspended in an updraft and grew) which is just remarkable. 

 

The RAP BUFKIT soundings for GON and HVN at were all subfreezing (by a fairly substantial margin) in the 00z-02z time frame so I'm not sure how else to explain it.

 

As for the rain I think the convection was so vigorous the latent heat release was messing with low level thermal profiles and developing pockets of >32F air where you wouldn't normally expect to see them.

 

If anyone as a chance to look at the dual pol data from that storm it is absolutely fascinating. I have it all on GR but I don't think I'm able to save a loop of it. 

 

Yeah...it was unlike anything I'd ever seen during a snowstorm. I remember sitting down to dinner and I heard what sounded like water pouring off the roof in a heavy downpour. It was not the normal sleet pinging we're all familiar with. I stepped outside and was like "WTF?" My first thought was it certainly couldn't be sleet...way too big...but the thought of hail seemed just plain stupid. Truly baffling.

 

It mixed for a good 2.5 hours probably. We would've had 3"/hr snowfall rates easy had it been snow. That mixing robbed me of my first 30"+ snowfall. My total was like 27.5"...without that mixing I think we easily would've approached 3 feet. It also made for a nightmare cleanup. We had like 15" of heavy wet snow, a 2-3" solid ice layer topped by another 10" of powder. We have a small driveway...single lane about 3 car lengths...and I spend 8 hours in total the next day digging it out. Snowblowers were useless. My neighbor across the street had a plow. Took him 6 hours just to get it out. We got lucky in that the town kept up with our street pretty well throughout the storm, so the street was passable by mid day the day after the storm. But places that weren't touched frequently through the storm ultimately requiried front loaders to dig out the streets. Plows couldn't handle it in many places. It really made me realize how much of a difference there is between 2 feet of snow and 3 feet in terms of cleanup time. The general public didn't seem to be able to grasp that. Lots of complaints about how long the clean up took...but the scale of the storm just simply isn't something we have to deal with on a regular basis.

 

I'd give just about anything to live through another storm like that! Shame that its unlikely we see something like that again in our life times.

[CT Rain]

Yeah...it was unlike anything I'd ever seen during a snowstorm. I remember sitting down to dinner and I heard what sounded like water pouring off the roof in a heavy downpour. It was not the normal sleet pinging we're all familiar with. I stepped outside and was like "WTF?" My first thought was it certainly couldn't be sleet...way too big...but the thought of hail seemed just plain stupid. Truly baffling.

 

It mixed for a good 2.5 hours probably. We would've had 3"/hr snowfall rates easy had it been snow. That mixing robbed me of my first 30"+ snowfall. My total was like 27.5"...without that mixing I think we easily would've approached 3 feet. It also made for a nightmare cleanup. We had like 15" of heavy wet snow, a 2-3" solid ice layer topped by another 10" of powder. We have a small driveway...single lane about 3 car lengths...and I spend 8 hours in total the next day digging it out. Snowblowers were useless. My neighbor across the street had a plow. Took him 6 hours just to get it out. We got lucky in that the town kept up with our street pretty well throughout the storm, so the street was passable by mid day the day after the storm. But places that weren't touched frequently through the storm ultimately requiried front loaders to dig out the streets. Plows couldn't handle it in many places. It really made me realize how much of a difference there is between 2 feet of snow and 3 feet in terms of cleanup time. The general public didn't seem to be able to grasp that. Lots of complaints about how long the clean up took...but the scale of the storm just simply isn't something we have to deal with on a regular basis.

 

I'd give just about anything to live through another storm like that! Shame that its unlikely we see something like that again in our life times.

 

I know, it was a once or twice-in-a lifetime kind of event. Less snow in 1978 but the drifts (and wind) made up for it. Hopefully we'll get something like that again.

 

I could almost see the "hail sleet" being a sleet/hail combo where the vertical motion (and convection) was intense enough to produce sneaky warm layers via latent heat release and the vertical motion was suspending sleet pellets and you were getting riming of supercooled water that refroze on the sleet pellet (like hail growth) or in some cases fusing sleet pellets together. 

 

The dual pol products from OKX show all sorts of weird stuff going on with mixing/melting layers just popping up all over the place but generally focused in a N/S band from just east of OKX north into Tolland County right along the eastern edge of that superband where convergence in low levels was very strong and some upright convection was taking place. 

 

If anyone has any other ideas/theories please join in!

 

I'd like to save a bunch of the dual pol screen grabs and make them into a movie file so you all can see. 

[OceanStWx]

I know, it was a once or twice-in-a lifetime kind of event. Less snow in 1978 but the drifts (and wind) made up for it. Hopefully we'll get something like that again.

 

I could almost see the "hail sleet" being a sleet/hail combo where the vertical motion (and convection) was intense enough to produce sneaky warm layers via latent heat release and the vertical motion was suspending sleet pellets and you were getting riming of supercooled water that refroze on the sleet pellet (like hail growth) or in some cases fusing sleet pellets together. 

 

The dual pol products from OKX show all sorts of weird stuff going on with mixing/melting layers just popping up all over the place but generally focused in a N/S band from just east of OKX north into Tolland County right along the eastern edge of that superband where convergence in low levels was very strong and some upright convection was taking place. 

 

If anyone has any other ideas/theories please join in!

 

I'd like to save a bunch of the dual pol screen grabs and make them into a movie file so you all can see. 

 

I would have a hard time believing true sleet (i.e. total melting even with latent heating going on). It's not unprecedented though, as the Groundhog Day blizzard in 2011 saw similar reports in northern Illinois.

 

And if lightning was as prolific last winter as in 2011 I would have to imagine at least some graupel production would be going on to generate those kind of charge separations necessary. If truly intense upgright convection formed, I could envision a scenario where enough super-cooled water was lofted to form hail from these suspended graupel particles.

[CT Rain]

I would have a hard time believing true sleet (i.e. total melting even with latent heating going on). It's not unprecedented though, as the Groundhog Day blizzard in 2011 saw similar reports in northern Illinois.

 

And if lightning was as prolific last winter as in 2011 I would have to imagine at least some graupel production would be going on to generate those kind of charge separations necessary. If truly intense upgright convection formed, I could envision a scenario where enough super-cooled water was lofted to form hail from these suspended graupel particles.

 

The 00z OKX sounding did have a layer near 0c at 900 mb before the balloon was ripped to shreds. I do agree that in that band with insane reflectivities (50-60 dbz oriented north/south - so definitely not your typical "bright band") you probably had suspended graupel/hail that was able to form. 

 

What is a little odd though is the reports of rain in interior SE CT during the height of the banding. Makes me think latent heat release from convection was intense enough to change an all snow sounding to a rain sounding - at least briefly. Essex, Old Lyme, and other towns around there flipped to pouring rain for a period of time. 

 

If you get a chance pull up the OKX level 2 data and check it out. It's really cool. 

[ORH_wxman]

Stumbled upon this last night...what a great 1-2 punch that was:

 

http://www.easternuswx.com/bb/index.php?/topic/182826-sne-discussion-thread-for-122108-winter-storm/page__st__1480

[Ginx snewx]

Stumbled upon this last night...what a great 1-2 punch that was:

 

http://www.easternuswx.com/bb/index.php?/topic/182826-sne-discussion-thread-for-122108-winter-storm/page__st__1480

PF saying he ONLY got 18.1, nothings changed

powderfreak

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• Location:Stowe, VT

Posted 21 December 2008 - 06:15 PM

 

This will definitely be a weekend to remember... my weekend total over here is only 18.1"

[jamesnichols1989]

so...do you live on the Cape?

 

Yes I do, I live out in Harwich, MA.

[N. OF PIKE]

Stumbled upon this last night...what a great 1-2 punch that was:

 

http://www.easternuswx.com/bb/index.php?/topic/182826-sne-discussion-thread-for-122108-winter-storm/page__st__1480

nice nite for Scott to jump off Tobin.

 

i prob would have had like 7-8 in Melrose/Wakefiled while areas 2 miles west got near a foot, but i could deal

[CoastalWx]

nice nite for Scott to jump off Tobin.

i prob would have had like 7-8 in Melrose/Wakefiled while areas 2 miles west got near a foot, but i could deal

No way. I got smoked the 19-20. I had about 3" in that storm there, but the two days prior targeted this area. In fact where I am now probably jackpotted on those days.

[CT Rain]

Missed this at the time - but take a look at the dual pol data from the Feb blizzard off OKX. Above the freezing layer (note bright band in CC) the positive/negative streaks of ZDR are depolarization streaks.

 

Atmosphere was so highly electrified the ice crystals were aligning with the electric field vector. 

 

Pretty sweet.

 

This is the 3.4 deg tilt so the top of the bright band is ~5kft and the depolarization streaks (normally seen in the anvils of thunderstorms) are above 8kft. The high amount of graupel and small hail in the clouds from convection was able to electrify the clouds enough for this fun. 

[OceanStWx]

Missed this at the time - but take a look at the dual pol data from the Feb blizzard off OKX. Above the freezing layer (note bright band in CC) the positive/negative streaks of ZDR are depolarization streaks.

 

Atmosphere was so highly electrified the ice crystals were aligning with the electric field vector. 

 

Pretty sweet.

 

This is the 3.4 deg tilt so the top of the bright band is ~5kft and the depolarization streaks (normally seen in the anvils of thunderstorms) are above 8kft. The high amount of graupel and small hail in the clouds from convection was able to electrify the clouds enough for this fun. 

 

Nice catch, and excellent use of depolarization.

[CT Rain]

Nice catch, and excellent use of depolarization.

 

I can't take the credit - http://www.nwas.org/jom/abstracts/2013/2013-JOM21/abstract.php

 

Pretty cool though to see that in a snowstorm - would be interesting to compare when the depolarization streaks appeared and archived lightning activity in the area. 

[CoastalWx]

That is awesome. Wow, so cool....another example of a WTF moment from this storm....and there were many.

[ORH_wxman]

I noticed NARR updated from this past winter....this is probably the best visual of the firehose from March 7-8

 

 

 

 

 

 

That's like 800 miles long.

 

 

 

[CT Rain]

Finally made some animations of the level 2 radar data from OKX from the blizzard. On the left is base reflectivity and the right is correlation coefficient. Notice how when the convection fires along that monster zone of frontogenesis on LI/CT CC drops rapidly indicating mixed phase. CC was very low at times (<0.75) which is pretty unusual for a winter storm. A lot of what you had was large, heavily rimed snowflakes and monster wet aggregates. In some cases we had hail under the strongest convection and in other cases we had sleet which seemingly appeared out of nowhere likely due to latent heat release from the convection screwing up the thermal profiles. Almost saw sleet up to Tolland in this storm! There are some really cool things in the dual pol data including depolarization streaks as the ice crystals were forced to line up by the electric field (lots of charge from lots of graupel interactions), gravity waves over NYC to the west of the strong convection (not sure if this was convection related or not) that likely played with the ptype over Nassau County and Queens (you can see lines of low CC even though BR doesn't show the inertial gravity waves too well in this case, and also lots of nonuniform beam filling down radial which screwed with the dual pol products from OKX over RI, N CT, and MA. 

 

http://ryanhanrahan.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/brcc_part1.gif

[CoastalWx]

I still can't believe how the fook that storm created what it did...lol. I mean yeah I get it, but man that was a big bag of WTF.

[Damage In Tolland]

I noticed NARR updated from this past winter....this is probably the best visual of the firehose from March 7-8

 

 

 

 

 

 

That's like 800 miles long.

 

 

 

That radar is a thing of beauty. One of my all time favorite images

[CT Rain]

I still can't believe how the fook that storm created what it did...lol. I mean yeah I get it, but man that was a big bag of WTF.

Right? Just crazy

[Damage In Tolland]

That radar is a thing of beauty. One of my all time favorite images

Have we ever seen something like that before?