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January 1978


KokomoWX

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Meteorologically speaking, there's not many that can hang with this one.

true, and it's funny that if you google blizzard '78 chances are you'll find info on the new england blizz that occurred a week later before you find info on this one. I consider myself incredibly lucky to have experienced it first hand in ohio. Waking up around 4am thursday morning in a cold dark house to that unrelenting roaring outside, is etched in my memory forever.

wouldnt it be awesome to track something like that today...with all the access to models and info we have.

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true, and it's funny that if you google blizzard '78 chances are you'll find info on the new england blizz that occurred a week later before you find info on this one. I consider myself incredibly lucky to have experienced it first hand in ohio. Waking up around 4am thursday morning in a cold dark house to that unrelenting roaring outside, is etched in my memory forever.

wouldnt it be awesome to track something like that today...with all the access to models and info we have.

Yea, unfortunatly the odds of getting a perfect setup like that for us again isn't very good lol.. for Ohio it could have been called "The Perfect Storm". Wish I could've seen it, but ill take my age instead lol. Amazing pics though Kokomo

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Yea, unfortunatly the odds of getting a perfect setup like that for us again isn't very good lol.. for Ohio it could have been called "The Perfect Storm". Wish I could've seen it, but ill take my age instead lol. Amazing pics though Kokomo

If I only knew then what I know now, I would have taken zillions of photos. Instead I just took a handful. I was 16 at the time.

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true, and it's funny that if you google blizzard '78 chances are you'll find info on the new england blizz that occurred a week later before you find info on this one. I consider myself incredibly lucky to have experienced it first hand in ohio. Waking up around 4am thursday morning in a cold dark house to that unrelenting roaring outside, is etched in my memory forever.

wouldnt it be awesome to track something like that today...with all the access to models and info we have.

I'm not sure that we'd even believe it to be possible, even if the models showed it and it actually made some sense. :lol:

Would be awesome to experience something like that again though.

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I'm not sure that we'd even believe it to be possible, even if the models showed it and it actually made some sense. :lol:

Would be awesome to experience something like that again though.

I thought I read that there were 20 foot drifts around LAF...at least in the more rural areas outside of town.

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I was not born until 1979 so I missed it but from all the stories I have heard I would have come up with the conclusion that a chance of something exploding over NE Ohio and then cutting slightly NW towards Cleveland is about me becoming a billionaire before I finish with this post.....I am not a billionaire so I would probably not believe it, either, until the storm was over and collected all the data. Needless to say I would be sleepless and be flying on Cloud 9 if that would to occur again. Something like that will occur again but when is anyone's guess and it could not occur for another 200 years.

Josh

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I just cherry picked FWA for obs for this storm on the 26th, but they're pretty crazy. Watch the temps bounce up and down as the winds shift direction.

2AM: 28º...24/33MPH NW 28.80in

4AM: 11º...41/54MPH W

8AM: 4º...37/50MPH WSW

1PM: 16º...31/38MPH WSW

3PM: 21º...32/29MPH W

9PM: 14º...33/50MPH W

http://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/KFWA/1978/1/26/DailyHistory.html?req_city=NA&req_state=NA&req_statename=NA

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How come nobody speaks of the 1977 blizzard we had too? It seemed much more impressive to me since I lived out in rural Clinton County then. I have a few photos from then too.

late 70's was just a crazzzzzzy time for winter wx. Just unreal. The funny thing was my family had just moved back to columbus in Oct. '77 after living the past 3 years outside philadelphia during one of their most snowless, boring, stretches of winters in the mid 70s. Talk about getting hit upside the head with a big bag of wtf....i thought my parents had moved us to the damn north pole..lol

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Ahhh yes.. the Superbomb of 1978. Occurred almost to the day of the Great Blizzard of 1977 the year before. I was a high school kid in southern Niagara Ontario just outside Buffalo when they let us early that day because of a blizzard warning for us. They didn't want to re-live the experience of 1977 when thousands of school kids were stranded at school for 3 or 4 days. So we we all went home at lunch. The center of the storm however went to our west, and other than some strong winds and blowing snow for awhile, it was a non-event for us. We all thought they had overreacted.. but obviously, it was a lot nastier to our west. Those were two amazing winters.. and it was the winter storms those years that really got me interested in weather.

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I have to agree with wxnut, eventhough at the time I was not alive. I remember when I was a kid with every winter storm we had all I ever heard was "won't be nothing like 78" or "you call that a storm? You should've been around in 78" so I believe it got me interested in weather as well in many ways. Tracking storms (on the wx channel when I was little) just hoping they'd be as bad lol.

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I have to agree with wxnut, eventhough at the time I was not alive. I remember when I was a kid with every winter storm we had all I ever heard was "won't be nothing like 78" or "you call that a storm? You should've been around in 78" so I believe it got me interested in weather as well in many ways. Tracking storms (on the wx channel when I was little) just hoping they'd be as bad lol.

its the one event that turned me into a wxweenie. In fact that whole winter did it for me, the blizzard just sealed the deal. Just to let you know how much of a weenie i WASN'T before that, i don't recall any forecasts or warnings leading up to the blizzard. I was actually surprised to hear and read after the fact that blizzard warnings were issued the day before, i have no recollection of any kind of lead up to that storm.

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Here's one

post-14-0-99810100-1294112254.jpg

I used to have one that showed the 956 mb isobar but can't seem to find it right now.

This is courtesy of NOAA. Thursday, January 26, 1978. Check out how the warm front in rotates back and begins to move southward through northern IL. We'll probably never see that again in our lifetime. Though I wasn't around for this one lol.

blizzard_78.jpg

That gradient over the lakes as well as the bent-back nature of the surface low over the Great Lakes has shipping disaster written all over it. I wonder how good the forecast was for this storm.

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The one I always hear about around here is the mid January blizzard of '79. Apparently it shut down I-80 from Des Moines to Chicago. Outside of that I don't know much about it. I guess a lot of residents in the QC ended up having to shovel off their roofs due to the immense snow pack after the storm. I was only 2 years old so obviously I don't remember it.

Edit: Just found this little tidbit from DVN... http://www.crh.noaa.gov/dvn/?n=01011979_brutalwinter

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its the one event that turned me into a wxweenie. In fact that whole winter did it for me, the blizzard just sealed the deal. Just to let you know how much of a weenie i WASN'T before that, i don't recall any forecasts or warnings leading up to the blizzard. I was actually surprised to hear and read after the fact that blizzard warnings were issued the day before, i have no recollection of any kind of lead up to that storm.

It was the unexpected ferocity of those storms that really left an impression on me.. Back then, we didn't see these storms coming 5 days out.. we didn't have days of overexcited media overhyping a storm. We didn't have 24 hour TV coverage following every flake as it started to fall. No.. back then, it was go to school or work, look out the window.. and wham.. wow, where did that storm come from?!! I sometimes miss that sense of unexpectedness or surprise that weather used to bring. I know, I know.. progress :)

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