Matt's Weather Rapport is written by Vermont-based journalist and weather reporter Matt Sutkoski. This blog has a nationwide and worldwide focus, with particular interest in Vermont and the Northeast. Look to Matt's Weather Rapport for expert analysis of weather events, news, the latest on climate change science, fun stuff, and wild photos and videos of big weather events. Also check for my frequent quick weather updates on Twitter, @mattalltradesb
Snow squalls swept across a good chunk of Vermont Sunday afternoon.
As always, these squalls led to rapidly changing conditions that probably stunned a few motorists out on the roads.
This post has a series of photos of the road in front of my house as the snow squall approached, hit and departed.
As it approached, it looked like a summer thunderstorm. Skies actually sort of got lighter as the snow got close, probably because of the snowflakes' reflectivity.
Then it was a winter wonderland, then it was gone. We piled up 0.8 inches of new snow in 10 minutes.
2:22 p.m. Almost here: The sky almost seems a little
brighter with all those snowflakes approaching
2:37 p.m. The snow squall moves in full force.
2:56 p.m The road is newly slick and snow covered, but
by now the snow squall is over.
For those of you who might not have wanted to go through my entire written year in review the other day, here's a quick video of some of my favorite weather and cloud photos of Vermont in 2018.
I didn't put in background music. Just come up with your own, as your taste might be better than mine!
A bush in my back yard in St. Albans, Vermont gets dusted with
snow Wednesday morning.
As of 8:15 this morning, most of the 0.7 inches of snow that fell on my St. Albans, Vermont property yesterday had melted.
The early shot of winter isn't quite over, as I noted a special weather statement from the National Weather Service in South Burlington alerting us to spotty freezing drizzle (ugh!) in the northeast quarter of the state.
Except in the Northeast Kingdom, yesterday's snowfall, while pretty, was not substantial. I did see a report of 5.1 inches in Derby Center and 4.5 inches in Holland, with a smattering of six inch totals over some high elevations.
Northern New Hampshire and Maine were the big "winners' in this storm. Upton, Maine had a foot of snow, and Berlin, New Hampshire was close with 11 inches.
Sugar maple leaves dusted in snow
yesterday in St. Albans, Vermont.
Also coming Saturday is that nor'easter type storm we've been talking about. As forecasts keep getting adjusted, it doesn't look like it will be a huge snow producer, except possibly on the highest peaks.
It looks like there might be some snow and sleet at the onset of the storm Saturday, even on some valley floors. But warmish air will move in aloft, and we'll have a cold rain instead for most of Saturday night.
Another storm might get going midweek, but nobody's sure if it will come close enough to give us substantial precipitation, and what form that precipitation might take.
In any event, scroll through the photos of the "snoliage" yesterday in this post, because it does have its beauty. I even did a short pano of the snow falling around my house yesterday, which is included below.
The skies cleared for a time in the late afternoon, which quickly melted a lot of the snow, but added some to the beauty around me.
Snow meling in my garden in late afternoon sun yesterday amid
fall foliage.
The sun came out late Wednesday afternoon but my back deck in St.
Albans, Vermont was not as inviting as usual, given that it was
coated in snow
Here's a very short video of the snow falling around my house in St. Albans, Vermont yesterday:
Every year, there's at least one iconic tornado somewhere in the United States that is just amazing to watch and terribly beautiful.
To be clear the terribly beautiful ones are the twisters that don't hurt or kill anybody.
So it was near Laramie, Wyoming on Wednesday when long lived tornado touched down beneath a supercell thunderstorm.
It hit near a populated area, and many storm chasers had already congregated near the supercell, so you know this was going to be well photographed and lots of people would take videos. Even a Wyoming Department of Transportation highway webcam caught a good image of the tornado.
Though it hit near a populated area, the tornado did not actually go through neighborhoods. It stayed mostly in open country. That's a great thing, since the twister was rated an EF-3.
A satellite tornado briefly formed that had maximum winds of 120 mph. That one wasn't on the ground long at all, but it went through a subdivision, causing damage to several houses.
While weak tornadoes are fairly common in Wyoming, strong ones are rare. Until this year, Wyoming had not experienced a tornado rated at EF-3 (winds of 136 to 165 mph) since 1987. In the opening days of June this year, there have been two such tornadoes in Wyoming. The Laramie tornado and one near Gillette on June 1.
Here's one video of the twister:
And here's another series of views from Laramie Live:
It's been lovely watching spring finally progress around my property in St. Albans, Vermont.
Trees are greening, flowers are blooming. I thought spring would never get here, but of course it did.
I spent much of the snowy, gloomy March and April wondering why I live in Vermont, and now I'm saying, "Oh, yeah, this is why."
I've been taking photos daily on one spot on my yard since March. The first photo, on March 19, shows the aftermath of a large mid-March snowstorm.'
The second photo, taken April 10, shows the frustration of early spring this year. As you can see, the sun is out, the snow has melted, but even with the sun, more snow is falling.
The final photo was taken Thursday. Much better, huh?
Same view, April 10: Better, because the snow is gone. The sun is sort
of out, but if you look closely, you can see falling snow.
A couple hazards to watch out for in the weather over the next couple of days:
First, today, don't set your brush pile on fire, and don't throw those dang cigarettes out the car window. It hasn't rained lately, so the remaining dry grasses and stuff from last year are very dry.
Don't be the one who sets that brush fire.
Today will feature dry air, sunshine and gusty north winds. That means any fires that do get going today across New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine could easily spread very fast and erratically.
You'll also notice it's cool out. That sets the stage for a frost risk across the area overnight and early tomorrow morning. Frost is still pretty common this time of year, but we often want to get our sensitive plants out early. But bring 'em in today, as it will be chilly and possibly frosty tonight.
Same view on Thursday. Much better.
There's another risk of frost Saturday night and Sunday morning, too.
But at least there's no snow in the forecast. And there is a warming trend in the offing for Sunday afternoon into at least Tuesday.
Sharp cutoff between snow and no snow over Indiana after Saturday's narrow snowstorm. Photo via @reubenlidster on Twitter. https://twitter.com/reubenlidster
As expected, a very narrow band of snow set up across parts of the Midwest on Saturday.
Actually the band of snow extended from North Dakota southeast to Virginia and North Carolina.
The unusual aspect of the storm, aside from the oddity of getting a late March snowstorm in North Carolina, was the narrow strip of snow. It was only perhaps 50 to at most 100 miles wide.
Some places in the snow band got nailed with more than a foot of snow. Indianapolis, Indiana received 10.2 inches of snow, the second snowiest March day in that city's history.
But just a short drive southwest or northeast of these very snowy places on Saturday would bring you to bare or nearly bare ground.
That diagonal streak of what across the center of this satellite photo taken Sunday is snow cover from an odd, narrow storm on Saturday.
The first photo in this post shows an aerial view of Indiana, near Indianapolis. (Click on the photo to make it bigger and easier to see)
You can see the farmfields on the left are covered in snow, while the ones on the right are bare. Some individual farms have what appear to be several inches of snow on one side of the properties with nothing on the other side.
The second photo is a visibile satellie image showing the northwest to southeast snow streak across the middle of the photo. That streak is all snow cover (The white on the lower left hand corner of the satellite photo is cloud clover.
You don't often see snowstorms like this!
It's all melting in most of that region now as warmer air and rain moves in.
Microburst in Phoenix earlier this week. Photo credit
Jerry Ferguson/Bruce Haffner/Andrew Park.
It's monsoon season in the Desert Southwest, that time of year when moisture from either the Gulf of Mexico or the Pacific Ocean off of Mexico is able to sneak into that normally dry part of the nation.
The result is thunderstorms, which erupt during the afternoons and evenings in the desert heat.
These storms can be whoppers, setting off blinding haboobs, which are waves of dense blowing dust, or microburst, which send great gushes of wind and rain to the ground.
There was a doozy of one in Phoenix the other day. (Video of it at the bottom of this post. The first of is what it looked like from outside it, the next, what it looked like right inside it.)
Photos of it look like the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb, but rather than the force of the explosion rocketing upward, it was a great gush of rain and wind slamming to the ground.
When water evaporates, it cools the air, which makes it more dense and accelerates its travel toward the ground within a thunderstorm.
Microbursts can be as dangerous as tornadoes. When they hit the ground, the wind spreads out from the point of impact. Near that point of impact, microbursts have been known to create wind gusts as high as 150 mph.
Microbursts are particularly dangerous for planes, and pilots steer clear. You can imagine what a big gush of air blasting downward could do with a plane. There have been incidents of nasty crashes because of these. Most of the time, airports and pilots see microbursts coming and either avoid them or don't try to land or take off near them.
The first video below was taken near or at the Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport. Note if you can the fact that some planes continue to taxi, but none take off once the microburst gets close to the tarmacs.
It's going to turn out to be a springlike week in Vermont, unlike the same week five years ago as we were recovering from one of the deepest snowstorms on record.
Burlington received 25.8 inches of snow on March 6-7, enough to be the third greatest snowstorm on record.
The snow fell atop an already deep snow pack which led to destructive flooding later that spring when the snow melted and heavy rain arrived.
The flooding was bad along Vermont's rivers, and even worse along the shores of Lake Champlain, which had record flooding.
Snow clogged street in Burlington, Vermont, March, 2011
As if to demonstrate how extreme March can be, the very next year, 2012, brought a March that was by far the warmest on record. It featured a week during which daily high temperatures were in the upper 70s and low 80s, pretty close to July levels.
But in March, 2011, we were digging out, thinking that spring would never get there. But it did, after that flood disaster.
This post contains photos of what Burlington, Vermont looked like during and after that storm.
Editor's Note: I've been away for a couple days because my dad, Henry, "Red" Sutkoski, passed away Saturday, January 23, 2016 at the age of 95. I want to thank him for always encouraging me in any and all ways to pursue every interest that made me happy, which of course includes weather and writing. Nostrovia, dad. The latest Matt's Weather Rapport post follows:
This post-blizzard igloo in New York City was
jokingly being advertised as a one bedroom
apartment for the low rental rate of $2,500 per month.
It's been a few days now since the Great Blizzard of 2016 finally trudged out to sea. I've still got a few random thoughts, images and videos that made some impressions on me with this truly historic storm.
Unfortunately, the storm has killed at least 38 people, a big death toll for a modern American storm.
And that death toll might go up, as people are subject to traffic accident on icy roads, carbon monoxide poisoning in houses with snow-clogged vents, heart attacks from the exertion of snow shoveling, and possibly structural collapses from heavy snow.
Transportation is recovering but is still screwed up. The airline industry at last report is still tryin to dig out of the 12,000 or so flight cancellations that had a worldwide ripple effect.
In any event, here the are, in no particular order are some of my impressions of this storm. Also, be sure to scroll to the bottom of this post for a few choice videos of the blizzard you'll want to watch.
Stop Whining About The Forecasts:
As expected forecasts in advance of this blizzard were not perfect. They never are and nobody should expecd them to be.
Even though some parts of the blizzard surprised forecasters, the predictions days ahead of this storm were nothing short of amazing. For three days or more before the storm, meteorologists told us the areas which would get the biggest blast were Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, parts of Kentucky, the mountains of North Carolina, much of New Jersey, Delaware and southeastern Pennsylvania.
Forecasts for the timing of the storm, the depths the snow would accumulate and the timing of the storm were absolutely spot on. That's an amazing job when trying to determine what a powerful nor'easter would do. And now notoriously unnpredictable nor'easters are.
The biggest surprise out of this storm was what happened around New York City, which got its biggest or second biggest snowstorm on record, depending upon where you measured. Twenty five to 20 inches in the NYC area is incredible.
True color satellite photo taken
Sunday clearly shows the snow on the ground
from the blizzard stretching between North
Carolina and southern New England.
In the days and hours before the storm hit, the New York City metro region was always expected to be near the northern edge of the blizzard conditions.
Meteorologists knew there would be a sharp cutoff between snow measured in feet just to the south, and snow measured in a few inches or just fractions of an inch just to the north.
That sharp cutoff was expected for at least three days ahead of the storm to be near New York.
And it was. But the heavy snow enveloped the metro area, where just a short distance north up the Hudson River Valley, there wasn't much.
Official forecasts had called for six to twelve inches to accumulate in New York City, but every meteorologist I could find emphasized in their forecasts that much more could fall, given the limitations of determining in advance exactly where the heaviest snow would fall.
That means people in the New York region should have been aware before the storm that more than six inches of new snow was a possibility
For anyone loudly complaining the forecast was "wrong," take a chill pill and shut up. In meteorology, the unexpected happens sometimes. Deal with it.
The Coastal Flooding:
In the annals of forecasting this storm, another accuracy of note were the warnings, again well in advance, that the storm surge along parts of the Middle Atlantic Coast would be quite destructive.
That turned out to be true, unfortunately.
People stranded atop a car
by a storm surge Saturday in
Ocean Beach, New Jersey.
As I noted previously, the flooding along the southern half of the New Jersey shore and in Delaware was worse than in Superstorm Sandy in 2012. Sandy focused its worst destruction on the northern half of New Jersey.
An incredible 66.1 inches of snow fell on Mount Mitchell, North Carolina during this storm, likely making it the biggest snowstorm in North Carolina history. Of that, 41 inches came on just Saturday alone.
In West Virginia, 42 inches of fresh powder fell on the community of Glengary, West Virginia.
Among the cities reporting their biggest snowstorm on record with this one are Allentown, Pennsylvania, with 31.9 inches, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 34 inches; Baltimore, 29.2 inches and Philadelphia, 25.3 inches.
Most of these cities had as much or more snow in this one storm than they do during an entire winter.
Heed The Warnings:
In the days leading up to the accurate Blizzard warnings with this storm, meteorologists, emergency managers and other public officials urged people to be off the roads by the time the storm hit.
Highways would rapidly become clogged with snow and stuck cars and trucks. The warnings said people could be stuck for many, many hours in life threatening cold and snow.
Luckily, everyone ended up OK, especially since emergency responsders were able to get out on the highway to make sure everyone had enough gas, food and warmth to make it through the night.
Things were a bit difficult on the streets of Washintgton DC
during the height of the blizzard.
I get it that the way the economy works these days, if truckers or freelancers in this ripoff "sharing economy" miss a day of work they miss wages or risk getting fired, no matter what the risk to the employee.
Employers ought to stop being so greedy and give workers a break if going out in the elements risks their lives.
Blizzard's Stupidest Twitterer.
All this stuff about snowbound roads and stuck motorists leads me to my award for the Stupid Twitterer Of the Blizzard Award.
As the blizzard worsened more than many had expected in and around New York City, Mayor Bill De Blasio initiated a travel ban on area roads.
De Blasio's sensible logic was that he didn't want people stuck in cars in dangerous conditions. Plus, he figured it would be easier to get the city moving again after the blizzard if snow plows could get out there without contending with thousands of stuck cars and trucks in the way of the job.
Todd Starnes, a conservative pundit who doesn't like anything a liberal does, even if it makes sense in an emergency,was outraged. OUTRAGED I say!!!!
He Tweeted that the travel ban, in which the NYPD threatened to arrest errant drivers was martial law, and "This is what life under communism looks like."
Yeah, the government was taking away the freedom for you to go out in your car and screw things up for everybody else.
The Naked Cowboy has been a fixture in Times Square
for years, and he didn't let a little blizzard prevent
him from performingn in his undies, as usual.
The paranoid World Net Dailyalso accused New York of enacting martial law by what they said was ordering people to remain in their homes. Of course there was no such order.
The NYPD made it clear that, as always, everybody was free to walk the streets of New York anytime they wished, blizzard or no blizzard.
During the next blizzard, I would invite Starnes to drive to a remote location with a near empty gas tank with no warm clothes or emergency supplies in your car.
What's Next?
The Great Thaw has now settled in so the snows can start melting. Other than this blizzard, it's been a fairly mild winter, and that seems to be continuing. Higher elevations in the Appalachians are likely to hold onto this deep snow for awhile because the thaws won't be too extensive there.
In the wide swath of cities and suburbs buried by the blizzards, daily thaws are likely for the most of the next week. The good news is, it won't get extremely warm, mostly 40s by day, and many places will have a few overnight freezes to slow things down.
In the short term, at least, this means that flooding from the snow melt will be limited to streets with clogged drains, and poor drainage areas.
But beware: There's lots of snow in the Appalachians, and if there's a particularly heavy rainstorm in the coming few weeks there could be trouble.
Videos:
The best time lapse video I've seen of the storm was taken by Wayne Bennett in Martinsburg, West Virginia. His camera took one photo every two minutes for 27 hours as the snow accumulated.
I love the hapless skeleton getting buried during the course of the video:
One of the most iconic videos of the blizzard is also the most adorable. Its the panda Tian Tian, absolutely loving the deep snow at the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington DC:
Here's some scenes, given to us by Storm Chasing Video, of the record high tide in Lewes, Delaware during the storm:
Sky over Philadelphia Tuesday. Photo via Twitter,
@Lozak_Jr.
As expected, Oklahoma style weather came to New England and other parts of the Northeast on Tuesday.
The region experience a number of tornado watches and warnings, wall clouds, hail, big winds and other staples of the type of weather more common in the Great Plains spring and summer.
As of early this morning, there were no confirmed reports of tornado touchdowns.
However, local National Weather Service offices in Connecticut, New Jersey and elsewhere are investigating pockets of heavy damage to see whether they were caused by tornadoes or straight line winds.
A video you'll see below shows what appears to be a tornado at Long Beach Island, New Jersey, and there were other reports of possible tornadoes in New Jersey, and possibly Maryland and Virginia.
A wall cloud, which is often a precurser
to a tornado, over Uxbridge, Mass
Tues. Photo by Pam Martin via Eric
Fisher on Twitter.
In and around Gloucester, New Jersey, a possible tornado overturned at least one car in a mall parking lot, and a number of homes and businesses were damaged,says NJ.com.
Tens of thousands of people were still without power in much of the Northeast Wednesday morning.
The weather is much calmer in New England today, with maybe just a few widely scattered garden variety showers and thunderstorms in parts of northern New England this afternoon.
But no rest for the weary elsewhere. Parts of the northern Plains and Midwest, pummeled by a derecho and destructive tornadoes Mondayare under the gun again today.
Severe storms, tornadoes, and flooding are likely in this area. Severe weather continues in parts of teh Midwest tomorrow, too.
Here's that video of a possible tornado in Long Beach Island, New Jersey:
And here's Tuesday's rough weather in Baltimore County, Maryland:
Yesterday's giant tornado ripping through Rochelle, Ill.
Us weather geeks, and some of the general public have been doing this for a few years now, but it still fascinates me.
With instantaneous media and technology, we watch disasters unfold in real time. We don't learn about them after the fact anymore.
So it was last evening as we watched an enormous, fast moving tornado rip across the northern Illinois countryside, live on our laptops and smart phones.
There were live feeds, videos and photos of the tornado and its damage put up minutes or seconds after the event happened, ever-changing radar images showing the progress of the storm and who would be targeted next.
The guilty part of this? It's disaster as live entertainment. Like a reality show,
Entertainment is a harsh word in this context, of course. I, and surely most people, were not happy or applauding to see the gigantic twister threaten lives and property.
We felt a sense of dread, not excitement, when we saw images of Grubsteakers Restaurant in Rochelle, Illinois, instantly reduced to rubble during the peak of the evening dining hour. Did anyone in there survive?
Another image of that giant Illinois tornado.
Happy spoiler alert: The restaurant's owner, a real hero, barked orders for everybody to go into a basement storm shelter as the storm approached. They were all trapped down there when a wall fell on the door, but were rescued, dusty but uninjured, about 90 minutes after the storm struck.
So it wasn't entertainment, exactly, maybe more like fascination, as the giant tornado kept at it on our computer screens. The storm was incredible, as most big tornadoes are. Its forward speed was frightening as it charged across the flat Illinois landscape.
Above the actual stout, wedge-shaped funnel, a fat, ragged cyclinder of clouds raced in a circle overhead. The clouds were white on the forward facing side as the sun tried to break through the clouds at the edge of the storm, and brown and black in the rest of the maelstrom.
Little fingers, mini funnels, sometimes reached out horizontally rom the main tornado. That's why we were glued to our screens watching this. It was a monster. A monster movie. Except the storm was real, and real people were suffering.
We'll go back today and look at some more updated videos, some of which are at the bottom of this post.
The tornado season is still young, and other large tornadoes could devastate other quiet Midwestern towns this spring and early summer.
When the next big tornado comes, we'll be back watching it live. And hoping the storms stay entertaining. By that I mean, completely missing any towns, villages, houses or farms.
From Live Storms Media, here's the Illinois tornado crossing Interstate 39:
The International Space Station caught this
view of the Northern Lights last night.
A large geomagnetic storm from the sun set off incredible displays of aurora borealis across much of the Northern Hemisphere, and parts of the Southern Hemisphere, both Monday night and especially last night.
Monday night, much of New Zealand was treated to the spectacle.
Last night, much of Northern Europe, including Britain, and North America, including pretty much all of the parts of Canada that had clear skies, and much of the northern United States got the great sky show.
The view of the Northern Lights from Yellowknife, Northwest
Territory, Canada last night. By Yuichi Takasaki
This was probably the most intense electromagnetic storm in the past several years, even stronger than the one last September that also caused spectacular shows.
As EarthSky.org notes, these geomagnetic storms, outbursts from the sun really, send lots of charged particles which bombard the Earth's upper atmosphere if the sun's outburst is aimed at us.
This causes electrons in the upper atmophere to go into a higher energy state.
When the electons get over this excitement and revert back to their lower energy, they release a photon, otherwise known as light.
Saginaw, Minnesota last night. Photo by Mark Tarello
via Twitter @mark_tarello.
Of course, there are zillions of electrons up there, so when a whole bunch of them get together and release those electrons, you get the type of aurora borealis a lot of people saw last night.
If these space storms are super intense, the can disrupt power grids on Earth. In fact some scientists say a really bad one could cut electrical power to much of the Globe for weeks or months.
Imagine how disruptive that would be.
Nothing that bad has happened yet in modern times.
This geomagnetic storm wasn't intense enough to screw up power grids. But it did give us quite a show.
Here in Vermont, it was kind of cloudy, but there were occasional clear moments. I saw a kind of a green, flickering haze near the northwest horizon as I took the dogs outside at around 4 a.m. today.
And there are nice photos and videos coming in from people who were watching the sky from on or near Lake Champlain.
Malletts Bay, Colchester, Vermont. Photo by
Dan Russell.
It's hard to say whether there will be another show tonight, but the geomagnetic storm has peaked, so a display as widespread as last night's is unlikely.
I've also got a couple videos, below to show what happened last night.
The first is a largely unedited series of time lapse images of the aurora over southern Saskatchewan, Canada:
Another time lapse, this one by Dan Russell o Northern Lights Now, over Malletts Bay, Lake Champlain, Colchester, Vermont:
A lake effect snow squall off Lake Ontario gets picked up by a cold front and extends the line of snow squalls into Vermont. Also note the southern extent of the snow cover in southern Ohio and central Indiana and Illinois.
I'm a little bit on a lake effect snow roll in this here blog thingy, but here goes another one.
Lake effect snows are fascinating enough from the ground, especially if you're clobbered with five feet of snow in as many days.
They're also interesting from space.
The first image in this post was taken Friday. If you click on the image to make it bigger, you see a lake effect snow band coming off of Lake Ontario.
You can kind of follow it as it appears to go through the Adirondacks, curving northeastward through Vermont's Champlain Valley.
An Arctic cold front was making its way south from Quebec. As the front approached New York and Vermont, it captured some of that lake effect snow and helped create a line of snow squalls that marched southeastward in tandem with the cold front front during Friday afternoon.
A long lie of snow squalls extends from Lake Huron down across Pennsylvania in this satellite image taken last week.
In the same first image, you can also see the southern extent of snow cover on the ground in southern Ohio and central Indiana and Illinois.
The second image is an overall view of the Great Lakes in full lake effect snow producing mode this week.
One interesting aspect is a band that comes southeastward off of Lake Huron, picks up a little extra boost as it goes over Lake Erie, then continues on as a line of squalls into Pennsylvania.
That's another example of a lake effect band hooking up with a cold front, that at the time was heading south through Pennsylvania.
Those squalls in Pennsylvania contributed to some nasty pileups on highways as they blustered through with their low visibility mixed with the added danger of roads quickly icing up. One of those crashes killed three people near Clarion, Pa.
You can also see clear skies over the western side of Lake Michigan, with clouds quickly filling in over the lake as clouds and snow forms.
Lines of snow squalls form on the Black Sea and move south toward Turkey as this satellite image taken last week shows.
The air flow is perpendicular to the longest fetch of the lake. Instead of one single, intense snow band with snowfall at the rate of up to four inches an hour, you get a mess of dense, weaker snow bands that cover a much larger area, but don't dump the deep snow like single bands do.
The third image is of the Black Sea. Really a pretty image. There's numerous bands of snow moving southward across the Black Sea.As I noted yesterday, these bands were persistent, and dumped a couple feet of snow in parts of northern Turkey.
Nightime photo taken last week of the Great Lakes, lake effect snow bands and the lights of the cities
The fourth image is of the Great Lakes and Northeast taken at night last week.
You can still see snow bands coming off of Lake Superior, and another strong, single band coming off Lake Ontario into the Watertown, N.Y. area.
You can see the lights of the cities, and that same line through southern Ohio and in Indiana and Illinois separating areas with snow on the ground to the north, and bare ground to the south.
Just try driving down this section of the New York State
Thruway near Buffalo, N.Y. today.
This is one for the record books out in western New York.
Snow in narrow lake effect bands is piling up to ridiculous levels as the weather pattern is just perfect to cause extreme lake effect snow.
How extreme? Some of the hardest hit areas just south of Buffalo has more than four feet of new snow since last evening, and are expecting total accumulations of up to five or even six feet by later tonight.
That's just one part of Cheektowaga. Another section of the same community has only had about two inches of snow. So depending upon where you are in one town, you had somewhere between two inches and four feet. Unbelievable.
Via Twitter, Tara Schwab took this photo
of a dog who is going to have a
challenging walk in Lancaster, N.Y. n
I wouldn't even be totally surprised if somebody exceeds the 82 inches of snow in a town south of Buffalo in December, 2001, considered the deepest lake effect snow on record for the Buffalo area
According to The Buffalo News,travel in these areas is impossible, cars are stranded. The New York State Thruway near Lackawanna is closed, and even firefighters and ambulances are having trouble getting to people in need of help.
The winds set up just right so that they blew from southwest to northeast along the entire length of Lake Erie. That allowed the air keep collecting and collecting moisture on a long journey across the lake.
Lake Erie water temperatures are well into the 40s. Not swimming conditions, but relatively warm. The air a few thousand feet above the lake is near 0 degrees.
The contrast allows for a lot of instability, helping to focus all the lake moisture into clouds and snow, which gets dumped onto the shore near and south of Buffalo.
Via Twitter, Mike Schnorr gives us a
photo of a car that's not going anywhere
anytime soon.
The winds also blew almost in tandem with the length of Lake Ontario, but not quite as perfectly, giving areas near Watertown more than three feet of snow.
These lake effect bands are only maybe five miles wide. The trouble is, they largely stayed in one spot, not varying much north or south.
Areas just north of Buffalo pretty much missed out on the action. While chaos was happening amid several feet of snow in the southern metro areas, municipalities a little to the north of Buffalo were out collected autumn leaves, because there was no snow in the way.
Just reading statements and forecasts from the National Weather Service office in Buffalo gives you a sense of the total chaos:
"Intense Lake Effect Snow Will Continue To Impact the Southern Half of the Buffal Metro Area: At 3:29 p.m EST, National Weather Service doppler radar indicated a lake effect snow band capable of producing snowfall rates of 4 inches per hour or more...and visibility near zero at times. The sharp northern edge of this lake effect snow band extends from South Buffalo to Depew and eastward towards Darien and Alexander. The southern edge of the band is hugging the Chautauqua County shoreline then extending inland across far northern Chautauqua County, the Boston Hills and Wyoming County. Travel within the most intense portion of this band from South Buffalo into the nearby southern and eastern suburbs is impossible. Local officials report all roads are impassable and clogged with snow and stuck vehicles. Do not venture out within this area. If you live north or south of the band of snow do not attempt to drive into the affected area. You will become trapped."
But wait! There's more! The lake effect snow is expected to continue into tonight, then redevelop Wednesday night and Thursday. Here's more nightmarish verbiage from the National Weather Service in Buffalo:
From The Buffalo News: Visibility isn't so great in the intense lake effect snow bands. Add caption
"Accumulations: Snowfall rates of 2 to 4 inches per hour in the most intense portion of the band. Storm totals will reach three to four feet in many areas south of a line from South Buffalo to Batavia. Local amounts of five to six feet from Lackawanna to Lancaster to Elma from the first storm ending on Wednesday. Additional accumulations of up to two feet in the second storm late Wednesday night through Thursday night in persistent bands. The heaviest amounts may again focus on the Buffalo southtowns."
Yep. That's right. After this lake effect monster is done, they get another one Thursday. And just for fun, here's what the Tuesday afternoon forecast for a town south of Buffalo looked like. I like how nonchalant the "total daytime snow accumulation of 27 to 33 inches" reads:
"Snow with areas of blowing snow. The snow could be heavy at times. Some thunder is also possible. High near 23. Breezy, with a west wind around 24 mph, with gusts as high as 36 mph. Chance of precipitation 100 percent. Total daytime snow accumulation 27 to 33 inches possible.
They just get around to the 33 inches at the end of the forecast? The snow could be heavy at times. Ya think?!?!
Here's a stunning time lapse video of the snow band as seen from just north of where it was burying towns under feet of snow. Looks like a solid curtain of snow:
Here's a homeowner showing us the scene outside his West Seneca, N.Y. home:
From the National Weather Service in South Burlington, Vermont.
Abrupt clearing behind a cold front Wednesday morning.
An unremarkable, weak cold front passed across northern New England on Wednesday.
Unremarkable, that is, until you see the satellite photos of it. And to a lesser extent, what it looked like from the ground.
Sometimes, a "dry slot"curls up behind a cold front associated with a storm system.
A dry slot is when a storm gets wound up, and the dry, cool air that usually comes in from the northwest behind a storm gets pulled northeastward and wraps itself into the east side of a storm
This actually happens a lot. But the photos of yesterday's dry slot in northern New York and Vermont are pretty cool.
In this case, the boundary between wet air and dry air at mid-levels of the atmosphere was abrupt, so you got the sharp boundary between totally overcast skies and totally clear skies that we saw yesterday.
Photograph taken in St. Albans, in northwestern Vermont less than an hour
after the satellite photo, above, was taken. From the ground,
you can still see the sharp line between cloudy and clear.
Dry slots don't usually last long in any one location.
Usually, moisture also wraps around a low pressure system, and continued winds from the northwest draw the wetness from the east, over the the northern top of the storm, then southeastward into areas that had initially been clear.
That's what happened in Vermont Wednesday. Skies cleared, it got fairly warm for this time of year.
The temperature in Burlington, Vermont reached 58 degrees under those briefly sunny skies within that dry slot.
That's eight degrees above normal. Nothing extreme, but nice for November.
But the clouds and cooler air began to filter in by mid to late afternoon, and the temperature slowly began to fall
By Thursday, northern New England was back into the typical November regime of clouds. cold rain, high elevation snow and generally blah weather.
The first fascinating satellite photo in this post is a visible image taken amid the clear skies Saturday.
With no clouds to get in the way, you can see the rust colored hue of the landscape in southern Quebec, New York's Adirondacks, and the northern parts of Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.
That orange-ish hue is the autumn foliage, approaching peak in this region. More to the south, you can see things are still mostly green in southern New England.
Morning fog is seen in the Connecticut River valley, and in the valleys of central and eastern Vermont.
The second satellite photo was taken this morning.
You can see river valley fog snaking up through the valleys, especially along the length of the Connecticut River, and in the Winooski and White River valleys of central and eastern Vermont.
Pretty cool vantage points of our beautiful autumn weekend.
This photo wasn't taken last winter.
It's this week, in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
Believe it or not, that's not a record early season snowfall. The earliest four inch snowfall on record in Calgary was on September 6, 1972, says the Weather Channel.
On August 25-26, 1900 the city had a two-day total snowfall of around four inches. And a dusting of snow covered the Calgary ground on July 23, 1918, adds the Weather Channel.
The cold air causing the snow is heading across the international border into the United States, so the states will get some snow as well.
Everybody has an opinion. Someone leaves
their thoughts on this week's snow in Calgary.
The cold will spread south and east across the Great Lakes, Plains, Ohio Valley and East Coast over the the next few days.
None of these places will get snow, but frosts and freezes are possible in some of these areas.
Meanwhile, the the great relief of people in Calgary, winter hasn't permanently settled in. Environment Canada forecasts a high of 50 degrees (Fahrenheit) on Saturday, 63 on Sunday and 75 next Monday.
Meanwhile, here's a chilling video of a guy's drive around Calgary during the snow. The trees don't look so good.
