Weekend Update 1/25/26

[randgust]

To anybody NOT hit by the winter storm on Sunday, you're missing a perfectly valid reason why everyone bailed in Springfield.

In NWPA, got a solid foot of snow with wind, and as you headed south, even got worse.   PADOT banned commercial traffic on main routes.   Schools closed today, even the banks bailed until noon, post office crippled.  It's a powdery, slippery snow, not high water content, and blows all over in drifts.   

While the standard joke is that if you get a foot of snow in PA, some people will actually resort to wearing long pants and a hat, didn't see any bare heads or knees on Sunday.

But a perfectly decent day to do the control panel and supply wiring for the East Hickory and Barge Yard T-trak modules.   I also got bitten by the DKS animation bug again.

[Ed Kapuscinski]

Update on those SD40-2s. Since I'm modeling a time when they were pretty new they're just getting a little bit of road dirt.

Damn they look good.

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[bbunge]

Here in the mid-Atlantic, many of us got 4-7 inches of snow followed by several hours of freeze rain.  There is a solid 2-inch thick ice crust on top of the snow that I can (215 pounds) walk on without it breaking.  Plastic shovels break if you try to break the crust. 

The city plowed mid-way through the ice, so there is a three foot pile of mostly ice at the foot of the driveway. 

[John]

Here in the mid-Atlantic, many of us got 4-7 inches of snow followed by several hours of freeze rain.  There is a solid 2-inch thick ice crust on top of the snow that I can (215 pounds) walk on without it breaking.  Plastic shovels break if you try to break the crust. 

The city plowed mid-way through the ice, so there is a three foot pile of mostly ice at the foot of the driveway.

I reported 7" today of total snow and ice to CoCoRaHS .. the total liquid catch in the guage was 1.9" from 7am Sunday to 7am Monday .. earlier in the storm I had a snow ratio of 8:1 -- so if the sleet hadn't hit, we would have had the potential for about 15-16"

[mu26aeh]

8-9" of snow with 1-2" of sleet on top in Gettysburg PA.  Complete waste of the cold weather getting that warm air aloft ruining things

[John]

8-9" of snow with 1-2" of sleet on top in Gettysburg PA.  Complete waste of the cold weather getting that warm air aloft ruining things

Might have another chance this weekend    ECMWF is hinting at another snow event this weekend with a low  .. they hype should start Wednesday

[Maletrain]

We got about 3.5" total on the mid Delmarva Peninsula. The bottom is about 2" of snow, with about an inch of sleet above that, topped with about 1/2 inch of ice.  I can walk on the ice crust without breaking through, but it is lumpy as well as slippery, so footing is hazardous.  I did manage to stomp hard enough to break through when I had to walk about 30 feet in it, but consider it lucky I did no t end up on my a$$.  The contractor hired to plow is still nowhere in sight, so we aren't going anywhere for a while.  Would much rather have had all that moisture as fluffy snow.  The iced trees are pretty, though.

[nkalanaga]

Maybe three inches of snow, with a little freezing rain, followed by 6-8 hours of rain, here in northeast Kentucky.  That all froze overnight, so there's really no snow left under the ice here.  It's just one to two inches of solid ice.  On the good side, little of it stuck to trees or wires, so few power problems, and the major roads were plowed during the rain, so they're in fairly good shape.  We really dodged this one, unlike last year about this time.

[Jbub]

Meanwhile in Salt Lake City, we've had .1" of snow at the airport (official weather site for the city, and the lowest elevation in the area at around 4200') for the entire season. The next lowest recorded total snowfall for the season to date is 18" YIKES! Our mountain snowpack, the majority source of fresh water for 2+ million people, is sitting around 50% of normal. Luckily, our reservoirs will likely still hit full capacity with the existing snowpack, but major conservation efforts will need to happen to preserve enough water for 2 or 3 bad years in a row.

[C855B]

10" in southern Illinois, and it's a balmy 7°F. Today is the third day of going nowhere. And it may be longer since I'm not all that certain that the car (AWD) will be able to break through the lovely windrow the city plow left, blocking our driveway. Cardiologist said "No shoveling snow!". Does ice count?

Cabin fever is setting in.

[djconway]

Here in Springfield, just over the river from the Big E show I'm looking at 18"-20" of snow on the back deck.
Its a bummer that the snow came at the same time as the show, but that's what happens in January in New England.

I wasn't planning on hitting the show this year, triple by-pass surgery Dec 23, and i don't have the stamina to do the walking required.

[John]

10" in southern Illinois, and it's a balmy 7°F. Today is the third day of going nowhere. And it may be longer since I'm not all that certain that the car (AWD) will be able to break through the lovely windrow the city plow left, blocking our driveway. Cardiologist said "No shoveling snow!". Does ice count?

Cabin fever is setting in.

I lived in Rantoul in the mid 80s when I was teaching weather at the AFB.  In the winter when we had a wind from the north, the snow would drift around our house and cover the car above the roof .. nothing like spending an hour in the morning moving a mountain of snow to go to work. 

[mu26aeh]

Hype starts Wednesday?  Its already here

[John]

Hype starts Wednesday?  Its already here

I wouldn’t bet the farm on a 96 hour chart just yet.

[mu26aeh]

Oh, that I know.  It's just all the weather junkies on FB that post worse case scenarios to drive traffic to their pages where the hype is coming from.  Then when it doesn't happen, people blast the "real" weather people saying you lied blah blah blah