The storm is over, the totals and reports are in.
Here’s the lowdown on the snowfall records from the Baltimore NWS:
NOUS41 KLWX 070328 CCA PNSLWX DCZ001-MDZ003>007-009>011-013-014-016>018-501-502-VAZ021-025>031-036> 042-050>057-WVZ049>055-501>504-071100- PUBLIC INFORMATION STATEMENT...CORRECTED REAGAN NATIONAL INFO NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE BALTIMORE MD/WASHINGTON DC 1030 PM EST SAT FEB 06 2010 ...PRELIMINARY SUMMARY OF TWO-DAY STORM TOTAL SNOWFALLS EXCEEDED IN THE BALTIMORE-WASHINGTON AREA... THE 32.4 INCH TWO-DAY STORM TOTAL SNOWFALL RECORDED TODAY AT DULLES INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT EXCEEDS THE PREVIOUS TWO-DAY STORM RECORD OF 23.2 INCHES ON 7-8 JANUARY 1996. THE 24.8 INCH TWO-DAY STORM TOTAL SNOWFALL ESTIMATED TODAY AT BALTIMORE/WASHINGTON INTERNATIONAL THURGOOD MARSHALL AIRPORT EXCEEDS THE PREVIOUS TWO-DAY STORM TOTAL SNOWFALL RECORD OF 24.4 INCHES FOR BWI AIRPORT FROM 16-17 FEBRUARY 2003. THIS WOULD ALSO BE THE 2ND HIGHEST TWO-DAY STORM TOTAL ALL-TIME SNOWFALL FOR BALTIMORE RECORDS WHICH DATE BACK TO 1871...BEING SECOND ONLY TO THE 26.3 INCHES WHICH FELL 27-28 JANUARY 1922. THE 17.8 INCH TWO-DAY STORM TOTAL SNOWFALL RECORDED TODAY AT RONALD REAGAN WASHINGTON NATIONAL AIRPORT IS THE SECOND HIGHEST TWO-DAY STORM TOTAL RECORD...SECOND ONLY TO THE 18.7 INCHES FOR NATIONAL AIRPORT FROM 18-19 FEBRUARY 1979. THIS WOULD ALSO BE THE 4TH HIGHEST TWO-DAY STORM TOTAL ALL-TIME SNOWFALL FOR WASHINGTON RECORDS WHICH DATE BACK TO 1871...BEHIND ONLY THE 27-28 JANUARY 1922 KNICKERBOCKER STORM WITH 26.0 INCHES...THE 12-13 FEBRUARY 1899 STORM WHICH PRODUCED 19.0 INCHES...AND THE 18.7 INCHES WHICH FELL 18-19 FEBRUARY 1979. AS WITH ANY MAJOR CLIMATE RECORD ACHIEVEMENT...THESE PRELIMINARY RECORDS WILL BE QUALITY CONTROLLED BY NOAA'S NATIONAL CLIMATIC DATA CENTER OVER THE NEXT SEVERAL WEEKS.
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OT.
The Sun is at it.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/img1.htm
Michael (01:49:34) :
Agenda21? Are you in France?
PiperPaul (01:29:56) :
It happens to me a lot. Touching the wrong key, usually. I put it down to being old and stupid : )) what’s your excuse : ))))
The map shows 28.5 inches for where I live which seems very accurate, but I wouldn’t put much faith in any snow depth measurement unless it is the melted version or a measure of “precipitation” and not some person using a yard stick to measure. We had some compaction and at least a few inches of snow melted on contact at the beginning of the event, all lost to the ruler. We also had winds and thus some drifting.
I had my own little imaginary UHI going on my driveway. After removing 24 inches of snow, we had another 5 inches which was able to still thermally protect the driveway until late afternoon. Every shovel full at driveway level revealed melted snow so there wasn’t the need to chisel a base layer of ice. (this morning, my little urban heat island will have given up its heat)
So, is a ruler the only way to measure show?
“The Day Of The Blogger
I believe this to be a pivotal day. It has been coming for some time, but, as ever, it has taken a seminal piece of writing to bring the necessary focus.
As I said earlier, Matt Ridley’s article could well become a classic in pin-pointing the moment when the democratic internet wrested elements of legitimacy from both the mainstream media and from science itself.
This is truly the Day of the Blogger. It is precisely why I have blogged: “to ensure that the mainstream media cannot exclude critical voices which deserve to be heard.”
It now appears that bloggers are becoming a Fifth Estate, a new, and vital, balance in the realm of politics, correcting and curbing the failures and excesses of the Fourth Estate, the press, which is too frequently subservient to the forces of the State, and of their wealthy, and often ruthless, proprietors.
This is why it is absolutely necessary that the internet remains free and open to all. This is why some newspapers need to apologise, such as The Times for its shameful editorial on “village idiots”. Above all, this is why Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband should be ashamed of, and apologise for, their recent attacks on the critics of climate-change science.”
urlm.in/ecqt
…-
“The global warming guerrillas
Matt Ridley salutes the bloggers who changed the climate debate. While most of Fleet Street kowtowed to the green lobby, online amateurs uncovered the spin and deception that finally cracked the consensus
Journalists are wont to moan that the slow death of newspapers will mean a disastrous loss of investigative reporting. The web is all very well, they say, but who will pay for the tenacious sniffing newshounds to flush out the real story? ‘Climategate’ proves the opposite to be true. It was amateur bloggers who scented the exaggerations, distortions and corruptions in the climate establishment; whereas newspaper reporters, even after the scandal broke, played poodle to their sources.
It was not Private Eye, or the BBC or the News of the World, but a retired electrical engineer in Northampton, David Holland, whose freedom-of-information requests caused the Climategate scientists to break the law, according to the Information Commissioner. By contrast, it has so far attracted little attention that the leaked emails of Climategate include messages from reporters obsequiously seeking ammunition against the sceptics. Other emails have shown reporters meekly changing headlines to suit green activists, or being threatened with ostracism for even reporting the existence of a sceptical angle: ‘Your reportage is very worrisome to most climate scientists,’ one normally alarmist reporter was told last year when he slipped briefly off message. ‘I sense that you are about to experience the “Big Cutoff” from those of us who believe we can no longer trust you, me included.’”
http://www.spectator.co.uk/spectator/thisweek/5749853/the-global-warming-guerrillas.thtml
http://stevejanke.com/archives/297856.php
Another story in a major UK national broadsheet http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7177323/Climate-change-research-bungle.html.
And lampooning is a good sign http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/matt/?cartoon=7170649&cc=7131751
Any snowfall south of the Manson-Nixon line?
“Now, the east gets less than that and the whole world is about to end with round the clock saturation news coverage.”
Legitimate complaint in part, but how many people are affected by such events in the Spokane area, as comapred to the 20 million or so affected in the swath from northern Virginia through central New Jersey that bore the brunt of this storm?
Ralph (02:48:58) :
Sorry, are we talking about those ‘inch’ thingys?
I’m sorry, but you’ll just have to get used to the US refusing to go metric.
Our children have been regularly traumatized for over a decade to make them worry about a coming thermageddon, to frighten them into getting their parents to do stupid things like using curly humming light bulbs. Now we have to explain to them how adults have systematically lied to them for power, money, and fame, which will further erode any trust they still have about adult authority.
Thus we are in no hurry to engage in discussion with the small ones about whether or not those are centimeterworms while having a few quarter-liters of hot chocolate.
This sounds like a one-liner from a standup routine at the Climate Comedy Club.
“THESE PRELIMINARY RECORDS WILL BE QUALITY CONTROLLED BY NOAA’S NATIONAL CLIMATIC DATA CENTER OVER THE NEXT SEVERAL WEEKS.”
(Rimshot, cymbal crash, laughter.)
G. Varros (04:27:29) :
Measuring melted snow (or weighing snow cores, which I do) gives you the liquid equivalent. That can’t give you snowfall, as the ratio snowfall to liquid ranges between 5 and 30, “normal” snow is 10 – one inch water gives you 10 inches of snow.
Snow depth is “officially” done by several representative samples and averaging though fixed “snow stakes” in good spots are unaffected by layers of freezing rain events.
Snowfall is very different and while I dislike some of the official rules, it’s done by periodically measure snow on a snow board and then clearing it. How well it is followed is unclear. Our raw temperature records are much better than our raw snowfall measurements, but at least the data isn’t abused as much afterwards.
See http://meteorologyclimatology.suite101.com/article.cfm/how_to_measure_snowfall_correctly
My main quibble with snowfall measuring is that the NWS says to measure and clear the snowboard every 6 hours, I think it should every 6 hours or when 6″ has accumulated. Beyond that compaction can start. I suspect every measurement has a small bias on the high side as people measure the top of the snow, which is not a perfectly smooth surface.
Completely OT, but worth a mention. I see that over on RealClimate they are discussing a piece of research, which attempts to “empirically estimate the distribution of gamma, the temperature-induced carbon dioxide feedback to the climate system.”
Part of their “empirical approach” involves the use of…
“an experimental (“ensemble”) calibration approach, by analyzing the time courses of reconstructed Northern Hemisphere T estimates, and ice core CO2 levels, from 1050 to 1800, AD.”
They go on make this assumption…
“ …most of the source reconstructions used in the study show, there is no time period between 1050 and 1800, including the medieval times, which equals the global temperature state we are now in; most of it is not even close…”
Despite that, their conclusion indicates that: from looking at historic temperature and CO2 data, when temperature rises the amount of CO2 fed back into the system suggests an insensitive response.
Good news – and that’s using Had CRU’s questionable temperature reconstructions, which probably suppress the temperatures associated with the MWP.
I agree: Bloggers and the Weather also brought us this hurried news release about NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory: The ‘Variable Sun’ Mission.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2010/05feb_sdo.htm?list1073366
The news report includes surprising comments from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), NASA Headquarters, NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center, and the University of Colorado.
From NASA Headquarters: “The sun,” explains Lika Guhathakurta of NASA headquarters in Washington DC, “is a variable star.”
From NRL: “Understanding solar variability is crucial,” says space scientist
Judith Lean of the Naval Research Lab in Washington DC. “Our modern way of life depends upon it.”
From NRL: “‘Solar constant’ is an oxymoron,” says Judith Lean of the Naval
Research Lab. “Satellite data show that the sun’s total irradiance rises and
falls with the sunspot cycle by a significant amount.”
From NAS: According to a 2008 study by the National Academy of Sciences, a century-class solar storm could cause twenty times more economic damage than Hurricane Katrina.
From Boulder, CO: “If human eyes could see EUV wavelengths, no one would doubt that the sun is a variable star,” says Tom Woods of the University of Colorado in Boulder.
From Goddard Spaceflight Center: “Understanding the inner workings of the solar dynamo has long been a ‘holy grail’ of solar physics,” says Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center.
Now the Department of Energy (DOE) scientists need to get involved and admit or deny that neutron repulsion is the energy source that powers the Sun and generates the cycles of solar magnetic activity that are empirically linked with changes in Earth’s climate.
I am grateful to everyone here for encouraging NAS, NASA, and NRL to re-examine old dogmas. It would be great if we could also get DOE scientists to reconsider their dogma about N-N interactions.
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA PI for Apollo
Oh, I should point out I measure snow depth with both a snow stake and a 4 foot yardstick. Before anyone (else) points out a yard is only 3 feet, let me point out that since I use it to measure snow depth in my yard the length can be anything.
Also, while I have a pitiful 3″ today, two years ago today I had 21″ On March 1st that year I had 39″, so a 3 foot yardstick would have been pretty silly.
Hmm, last year today I had 20″. Clearly global warming has taken its toll on New Hampshire.
G. Varros (04:27:29) :
Yep. The depth can be arbitrary. As you said there are a number of factors. The initial part of the storm here had some sleet. All of my NE windows are covered in ice.
I live on the other side of town which would indicate somewhat less if following the BWI-IAD gradient but today I had to remove the NE facing storm door because I couldn’t open it and a recent visitor waded through snow in the street that came up to nid-thigh. The snow in front of the door was mostly drift but the street wouldn’t have had much. Strangely the deepest drifts are all situated upwind. Wonder why.
The pseudo religion has hedged it regardless of what happens. If its colder than average they blame Anthropogenic global warming. If its warmer than average they say it Anthropogenic global warming.
If my eggs cook in the pan thaey’re being cooked. If they are put in the freezer they’ll also be cooked by the freezing radiation above absolute zero.
I’m sorry but their logic is just nonsense, and they know it. (Unless the pudding headedness is as degenerate as that of Prince Charles)
What’s up with the weather channel’s record high’s and low’s? This time of year I usually start to look at the Average temps listed on the weather channel website so I can see the progress of the coming spring. Along with the average they also list the record high’s and low’s. Many of the records used to be from the early 1900’s to 1940’s but now I don’t see any record High’s or Low’s from earlier than the 1950’s. Did they decide those temps weren’t reliable enough and ditch them?
Drought and forrest fires.
And more of it.
OT:
Obama cancels Moon return project
President Barack Obama has cancelled the American project designed to take humans back to the Moon.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8489097.stm
Hope blizzards will freeze all the members of the Club of Rome, their employees, servants, silly followers and their dreams of absolute power.
How can anybody explain such a desire for power?, it is simply illogical, it reveals, in any case, a grave mental impairment.
An amazing 35″ here in western MD. Snow up to my waist. The snow level on my roof concerns me — must be tons of weight on it. Any additional snow might bust it.
Despite that, I’m not screaming about global cooling or “climate change”. The rational explanation is a moisture-laden El Nino jet-stream colliding with cold, dry Canadian air to the north.
22:03:43
“Anyone have contours software?”
Raw data rearranged into a bit more convenient CSV file is here: http://dplot.com/wuwt/dc_snow_06feb2010.csv
Contour plot, raw data: http://dplot.com/wuwt/dc_snow_06feb2010.png (a bit chunky because of the triangulation)
Contour plot, smoothed: http://dplot.com/wuwt/dc_snow_06feb2010_smoothed.png
maz2 (04:29:15) :
I am thinking now that the usual conduct of the people who secretly realize themselves inferior makes them protect what they consider will avoid them the pain of being discovered in their real nature; that is why they tend to form gangs among “peers”, so, as it has been discovered in “Clima – Gate”, the same can be surely found in other areas of established and consensual science.
Just stir it up and it will emanate all kind of odours, and a lot of people will be exposed as it happened in Climate-Gate.
There are more GATES to be opened for the sake of science and humanity.
Here’s a new controversy for you. It seems that there are two snow totals for BWI airport 24 and 28 inches. Why? There’s more than one way to measure: at the end of the storm or hourly (and other periods). There going to have to kick it upstairs to the “Weather Court” to decide which is the total for Baltimore.
Rob N (06:37:08) :
I was wondering when someone else would notice.
Part of that answer has to lie with Media nuggets. You can’t exactly have a whole lot of new records to yak about on the Nightly Forecast if your base goes back over 100 years.
This is one area where printed media can and still does do a far better job of keeping things in perspective.
On the other hand, telemedia these days often goes over the deep end with sensationalism, and as such opens itself up to abuse.