Southern Snowstorm One For The Record Books. In Northeast - Meh

Aerial view of Corpus Christi, Texas Friday, with
its palm trees all weighed down by heavy snow. 

I'm still amazed by the huge area of snow that fell Thursday and Friday along almost the entire Gulf Coast, which rarely gets snow.

And the amazing thing is the real estate the snow covered. All the way from Brownsville, on the southern tip of Texas, all the way to Pensacola, on Florida's panhandle. College Station, Texas, got five inches of snow, the most since 1949. Some of the higher spots around Corpus Christi, Texas got up to 7 inches.

As I mentioned yesterday - and it bears repeating because it's so amazing - As of Friday afternoon, Corpus Christi has had more snow so far this winter than Denver, Boston, Caribou, Minneapolis, Chicago, Cleveland and Detroit combined!

Mobile, Alabama, right on the Gulf Coast, got an inch of snow, the earliest on record there. Data in Mobile goes back to 1881. Carrolton, in northwest Georgia, picked up 10 inches of snow, and up to 15 inches was reported on the hills near Ashville, in western North Carolina.

The storm brought lots of joy to people in the South who aren't accustomed to snow, but also headaches. There were quite a few car crashes and up to 250,000 people lost power as snow accumulated on trees that still had leaves. Up to 625 flights were canceled at Atlanta's airport.

Now, as expected, the storm is making its way to the northeast, and will lay down a stripe of snow all the way to Maine and the Maritime Provinces of Canada.

At least when you get further and further north, a moderate sized snowstorm is no big deal for December. Still, there are winter storm warnings in patches in and around Virginia, parts of New Jersey, Delaware and southeastern New England. Areas in between these warnings are under winter weather advisories. There will be anywhere from four to 10 inches of snow from Virginia to Maine today and tonight, with locally higher amounts.

Here in Vermont, we're still looking at one to three inches of snow east of the Green Mountains with very little in northwestern Vermont. A series of weak disturbances and cold temperatures next week will whiten the ground nicely in those parts of Vermont that totally miss out on the snow tonight.