From the “weather is not climate department”, it seems that the biggest snowstorm of all time is targeting the nation’s capitol. Here’s the current radar image:
via NOAA/NWS
SPECIAL WEATHER STATEMENT NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE BALTIMORE MD/WASHINGTON DC 1234 PM EST FRI FEB 5 2010 DCZ001-MDZ004>007-009>011-013-014-016>018-VAZ042-050>057-501-502- 060145- DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA-FREDERICK MD-CARROLL-NORTHERN BALTIMORE- 1234 PM EST FRI FEB 5 2010 ...RECORD SNOWFALL FORECAST IN THE BALTIMORE-WASHINGTON DC REGION... ...EXTREMELY DANGEROUS WINTER WEATHER CONDITIONS DEVELOPING TONIGHT... GUSTY NORTHEAST WINDS 20 TO 30 MPH WITH VISIBILITIES FREQUENTLY FALLING BELOW ONE-QUARTER MILE DUE TO HEAVY SNOW WILL DEVELOP TONIGHT TO PRODUCE NEAR-BLIZZARD AND EXTREMELY HAZARDOUS WINTER WEATHER CONDITIONS TONIGHT THROUGH SATURDAY MORNING. TRAVEL IS HIGHLY DISCOURAGED TONIGHT AND WILL BE VERY DANGEROUS. LOOKING BACK AT THE BIGGEST STORM OF RECORD FOR WASHINGTON DC... THE JANUARY 1922 KNICKERBOCKER STORM...28.0 INCHES OF SNOW WAS PRODUCED FROM 3.02 INCHES OF LIQUID WATER. CURRENT FORECASTS FOR THIS EVENT HAVE TOTAL LIQUID FALLING FROM THIS STORM APPROACHING 3 INCHES...WHICH ACCORDINGLY WOULD CREATE A SNOWFALL THAT WILL RIVAL THE KNICKERBOCKER STORM TOTAL. GENERALLY ACROSS THE REGION...20 TO 30 INCHES OF SNOW WILL FALL BY SATURDAY EVENING. BALTIMORES RECORD OF 26.8 INCHES FROM THE PRESIDENTS DAY FEBRUARY 2003 STORM WILL ALSO BE THREATENED.
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Mike D. (15:49:08) :
“The biggest snow job in DC history? It staggers the imagination.”
Yeah, I’ve seen much, much bigger snow jobs in D.C. when congress was in sesssion.
(Beat ya to that one, Pamela Gray ;o)
Don’t worry frozen denizens, it’s really warm snow.
And it’s rotten too.
So there.
JT (15:50:37) :
To get some really, really big snow falls it helps for the storm to stall just off the coast. That’s what happened to Massachusetts and Rhode Island in the (NE) Blizzard of ’78. Three storm enhanced high tides took of 100′ (30 m) of Cape Cod, 10 years worth of erosion in one storm. Inland I think the highest snowfall was 40+ inches, (1+ m).
The current storm is rather stretched out, so while it won’t be stalling, it will drag quite a moisture feed across the area. If you watch the weather maps I suspect you’ll see the storm wind up off the coast and turn into a more compact circular storm than it is now. It may also twist up the frontal structures that make it an extratropical “baroclinic” storm and start taking on some tropical characteristics for a day or so, but that’s something that deserves more study.
Dang. Up here in New Hampshire we might get a little cirrus. Oh well, I’m happy to sacrifice my storms here if they make my congressional delegation feel at home.
Besides, I was in the Blizzard of ’78, the most impressive weather event I’ve ever attended. There will be a couple hundred people who find http://www.wermenh.com/blizz78.html this weekend.
A few more human sacrifices are required me thinks!.
One of my ‘younger’ brothers in the DC area just emailed me to complain about the snow (and the need to shovel it) and asking if I could remember anything similar from childhood. Well, I can remember one or two big dumps around the time I was being taught an Ice Age loomed, but not two in the same winter. I’d feel sorry for him, except I live in Alberta and a new Ice Age will destroy me long before his back breaks from shovelling snow.
Climate is just accumulated weather and I don’t have a clue what is going on with our climate. But I do know that the last 20 years of climate science funding has been a waste of the taxpayers’ dollars – and we should have a better idea of what is going on after spending all that money. Big federal funding of science may be useful for a Manhattan Project or for putting someone on the Moon, but it is a disaster for everything else.
I’m thoroughly out of my depth on this one, but I can’t help wondering if all this cold weather reflects changes in the Arctic climate, with cold transfer to nearby regions. In other words, heat transfer into the arctic.
Hope all is well with my friends over the pond. Keep the fire well stoked with logs and the oil tank full. We’re due to get a dose of the white stuff early next week here in England, although it will probably be a mere dusting compared with what your going to get!
Ain’t this CAGW blooming marvellous?
Good luck all.
Great pictures. Out here in Wyoming, where it gets quite cold in the winter, I have never seen that many arcs at one time.
Negative, Vibenna.
On a global scale, hot air rises near the Equator because of the intense sun between Tropical latitudes, and the pressure difference between the Arctic and the Equatorial regions moves air from the Arctic to the Tropics.
The Coriolis force of the rotating Earth shifts the high-level winds (to the West) in the N Hemisphere
Brian G Valentine (16:26:10) : “…what is making the trees in the background stand out in incandescence? ”
I unsharp masked the image in Adobe to bring out the Perry arc.
James the Simple (16:24:01) : “You must have been looking at just the right time, as I didn’t see anything.”
They were visible (worthy of ‘trying’ to take pictures) from around 2:45 until around 3:33 with only about 10 minutes where the it was peaking so to say. The clouds were thickening really fast so the opportunity was really short.
I don’t have a snow blower. I’m going to weigh a square foot of this stuff and eventually measure my drive way once my back recovers from shoveling, so I’ll know how stupid I am not to have one. I do have a few snow plow enthusiasts living around me, they’ve been going at it for hours and we only have maybe 5 inches right now.
If this storm amps up like the March 1993 storm, we should get some blue lightning tonight.
GV
Ah! They are just sayin’ it’ll snow so that you stock up on groceries! 🙂
Somebody should call up old Pachyderm, and ask him if all of his Himalayan Ice and snow is being transferred to Washington DC.
Maybe we could arrange to have it delivered to the UN building in New York instead; by train of course.
Well I guess this means there won’t be any Cap and Trade votes in Congress over the next few days!
Now if Congress would just shut down for the rest of the year we’d all be better off.
Was in the DC area and saw back to back storms in DC the winter of 1986-1987. They dropped 15-16″ apiece and we had a good yard on the back deck after it was all over. The fun part was that it was cold for a week or two afterwards and the roads were awful and icy for a long time. Lots of people saw their auto insurance go up the next year.
Comment about divine intervention reminded me of an old Bill Cosby line: God has a sense of humor. There is also a non-Cosby corollary to that observation: When that sense of humor takes place, it is best to be at least a 3-state radius away from it. Cheers –
Kev Trenberth, 2002:
“We’ll never see winter as we once knew it again !!!”
The UK is on notice to expect another freeze this week. GW just keeps on coming.
G. Varros (15:53:23) :
“and another one of some geese fleeing with a nice zenithal arc in the background”
—–
nice pictures and info!!
also nice picture of geese (birds) adapting to the environment, by relocating.
birds are evolved from dinosaurs, correct?
evolution gave them wings to adapt to climate changes.
sorry to hijack your comment.
Would some of our green communist friends call Putin and see if he can spare an icebreaker for the Potomac?
Obama sold ours when he was told the artic was icefree.
I could be wrong. It could be the repo man from China took it. We haven’t been paying our bills. Bush was distracted with WMD’s
What is:
1) top secret
2) orchestrated by self appointed few
3) gonna make us mega $$Fat
4) undetectable by the sheeple
5) dominion over the sheeple
… A Snow Job.
Claude Harvey 14:59:47
re “those loons in Washington DC”, I resemble that remark!
I am a native, have lived just outside in Virginia all of my life, and yes we get our share of transient loons in government and diplomacy.
We are socked in with plenty of food and beer as the inches pile up (it has been snowing nearly sideways from the norhteast), the neighbors have chipped in on the plan for digging out, and I am keeping a path dug across the back porch so the dog can get out!
Our local blogs are lit up with some of our loonier progressives painstakingly assuring the rest of us that our lame jokes about global warming simply go to prove that we don’t understand that climate does not equal weather.
(Funny how when the same ether was lit up with wailing that Bush’s refusal to ratify Kyoto had caused cannibalism in the Superdome because of Katrina, weather most certainly did not only equal climate, but political climate as well!)
Given the current political occupants of DC (until our midterms), I really don’t mind your wishes for six feet of snow on SOME of Washington!
Wish us luck, and thank goodness for real fireplaces and a nice wood rack on a covered porch just in case!
Apparently China is more objective than Western countries when it comes to “climate change”. click
Paging Marion Berry!
Well, we survived the Great French Toast Panic her in Phila.
EVERYONE has to get in bread, milk and eggs.
The snow started in Philly about 2 hours ago and we already have an inch on the ground, 12 – 16 inches predicted.
The words “of all time” are always so silly, since we don’t know what happened even a relatively short time ago, nor what will happen in the future. Anyway, looks like it’s not going to be that bad, just pretty wet.
The Perfect Storm!