This Year's Southern Winter Kind Of Like A Northern One

Look closely and you can see snow dusting the roofs in
the New Orleans French Quarter as dawn broke this morning. 

Boy, the southern United States is having a rough winter!

True, a rough southern winter is not nearly as bad as a so-so northern winter, the kind we experience here in Vermont. But we're tough and can handle it.  

They're not used to it down there.

And it's quite a mess today from Texas to North Carolina. This is the third time this winter the Deep South has shivered in a frigid winter storm.

The storm that dumped snow, freezing rain and sleet across Texas and Louisiana yesterday kept moving east and eventuallty north, leaving record cold temperatures in its wake. The storm is leaving most of the roads in the South impassable, too.

From Shreveport to Jackson, to Birmingham to Atlanta, on up to Raleigh, nobody's on the roads. Well, almost nobody. The few that ventured definitely risked life and limb. In Austin, Texas, a man died when his vehicle plunged 30 feet off of an icy overpass.

If you cherry pick the examples of what's going on down there, it's pretty incredible in spots.

The Pensacola, Florida Bay Bridge was completely iced over, something you rarely see in northern Florida: Even rarer: There was Arctic sea smoke on Pensacola Beach. That's something you see much further north, like in New England. It's basically steam created by the difference between the relatively warm water and the frigid air.

We also had the spectacle of seeing snow dust the roofs in New Orleans this morning. New Orleans had its coldest morning today since 1996 at 20 degrees. Houston reported the same - with a low of 19 degrees.

Atlanta looked pretty frozen and white
from the air this morning 

The storm is moving north, as noted, and could dump up to 10 inches of powder on parts of North Carolina before the end of today.

As forecasters had expected, the snow extends north into New England today, where we can handle of snowstorm of two to 10 inches.

(Northwestern Vermont is being spared, with just light snow and flurries, though patchy dense freezing fog is causing black ice and poor visibility in parts of Vermont's Champlain Valley.)  

If you wanted warm weather, you would have done well to head to central Alaska. In Fairbanks, where low temperatures in the 20s and 30s  below zero are quite common this time of year, it was above freezing, with a very rare rain coming down earlier today.

It still looks like the weather pattern is about to switch to one that is less topsy turvy. It's going to be in the 60s across the winter storm zone in the South by this weekend. Meanwhile, in Fairbanks and other places in Alaska, the temperature will go well below zero by this weekend.

In other words, all will be right with the world. At least the weather world.