You’ve probably heard the forecasts already, watch it advance on radar below:
Animate this image: >>> 
Look at all of the warnings below, the red area from Oklahoma to Lake Michigan is Blizzard Warning while the pink is Winter Storm Warning:
click map for the latest warnings
The synoptic map shows freezing rain ahead of the system, followed by heavy snow. It’s the worst sort of situation.
The NAM snow depth model output for the next 48 hours shows a wide swath of 12-24″ of snow accumulation from near Dallas to Chicago with even more near NYC and BOS.
The plan: stock up and stay home, and make sure you have a backup plan for heat if the power goes out.
Forecast snowfalls are the heaviest in Oklahoma, but I think the blizzard will be moving sufficiently fast that Chicago will not see as bad as previously expected/wishcasted.
Check out the chance for snow/ice/frozen precip in Louisiana!
RJohn:
Even if you can keep all the snow and ice off of your driveway…Where’re you gonna go?
Dennis Wingo says:
“Just got to my hotel in Fredrick MD. 24 degrees and freezing rain.”
So? In most of the world 24 degrees Celcius is very comfortable.
Most of the world uses Celcius. Scientists and engineers in the US should be using Celcius. Climate discussions should be scientific.
WUWT is an international site. Can we please adopt the convention that if people MUST use the Fahrenheit scale, they should state F or Fahrenheit? If the scale is not mentioned I will assume Celcius.
REPLY: Don’t make me pull Kelvin on both of ya’ – Anthony
And to think just last Friday I was able to play nine holes of golf! Tuesday morning at dawn it’s expected to be around 28 degrees, with wind chills in the low teens if not lower.
I wouldn’t mind a little CO2 type of warming at the moment. It’s sooooooo cold!!!!
jaymam says: Most of the world uses Celcius. Scientists and engineers in the US should be using Celcius. Climate discussions should be scientific.
Um, so can I safely assume that you ONLY ever state time in units of seconds? After all, the hour, minute, and day are NOT S.I. units….
REPLY: Don’t make me pull Kelvin on both of ya’ – Anthony
Oh, common… you could at least use Rankine… 😉
BTW, also remember that the Meter was mis-measured and is NOT a proper fraction of the earth circumferance… so it didn’t meet it’s first stated goal. That makes it an arbitrary and slightly irrational unit. Now, if we were to use a length based on a physical property like, oh, a pendulum, we could get some rational units:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2011/01/30/unifying-the-cubits-the-yard-and-the-rod/
(Sidebar for those thinking of blowing an S.I. gasket: I’m ‘multilingual’ and work equally well in K, R, C, or F along with Rods, feet, meters, miles, knots, and even barleycorns and Imperial Gallons… Units are all rather arbitrary things and they all work. Besides, those metric things are just Sooo archaic… from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Mesopotamian_units_of_measurement
(yeah, it’s a wiki, but this is all just in good fun…)
Yes, it glosses over that the PROPOSAL to use the second pendulum was ditched for the botched arc survey, but the units are actually pretty close and the old Mesopotamian units do end up remarkably like the S.I. units… And it is fun to ask folks why they want to use a set of units that are 4000 years old 😉
Big deal. People have such short memories. Here in Toronto we are forecast to get 30 cm., and it used to be (pre-1991, say) to get one or two snowstorms of this magnitude every winter.
I shopped today for extra bacon and sausage and bread and made sure the ice chipper and salt were by the front door. Feel free to neglect to call in the Army, I think we’ll cope.
Oh, and it was a very pleasant and sunny day today out here in Kalifornia. I spent some shirtsleve only time in the sun and garden. That’s the good news. That bad news is that it had been cold, overcast, and raining for weeks on end before now.
Seems ever year we get a couple of weeks of ‘false spring’ in January. Then the bad stuff returns… Oh, and every time it’s really a frozen wonderland “back east”, we get a nice day… So forgive me if I’m just a tiny bit happy it’s snowing back there and not drenching rain out here…
Our local meterologists have called it right so far. They called for 0.1-.25″ overnight accumulation of ice from freezing rain. I just got in from salting the drive and it was right in the middle of their range.
It’s supposed to warm up to all rain for the best part of the day and then the temps drop. I can handle a change to snow but they are forecasting that it will go back to freezing rain before the snow.
Ice under snow really sucks.
Pat Frank says:
January 31, 2011 at 10:19 pm
It is NOT a coincidence. This is a preview of the weather changes.
But no one listens to that one lone voice with a massive amount of research and knowledge.
E.M.Smith:
“That bad news is that it had been cold, overcast, and raining for weeks on end before now.”
Bah.. I was in LA from the 10th to the 17th and the weather was perfect! Mind you, I’m sure glad I wasn’t there the week before 😉
AleaJactaEst, what you should do is send her to the UK site which records how much power the existing turbines are putting out.
http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp.php
This is with, from memory, around 3,000 turbines, and they generate anything from a fraction of a percent to about 2 percent of our consumption.
OK, if the claim is that we could generate double our consumption, how many turbines would that take? 100 times as many as we have now, if we will settle for a 1% threshold? That would be 300,000. Now ask, where are they going to go? You put them offshore, how are you going to service them? You put them on every hilltop, there is still not enough space for them.
And then the question to ask is what happens during a winter cold spell as in December? In December there were several days when they did not contribute 2% or 1%, but rather 0.1% of our power consumption. So, you seriously think you can build enough turbines to deliver double our consumption, how many would that be if the usual cold winter high pressure periods?
And if you have to have total backup for them to cover those periods, how much does that cost?
The other question I would ask is about fuel poverty. The current UK feedin tariffs are paying around 10 times the wholesale price for people to generate small scale amounts of power. So what happens to the UK if we end up paying these prices for power on any scale? Economic disaster and fuel poverty is what happens. Which is why French, Germans and Spanish are hacking their feedin tariffs to bits as we speak, retrospectively by the way in the case of Spain.
Get hold of ‘Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air’. Its available from Amazon, or downloadable as a free pdf. There is a chapter on wind. The author is a ‘strictly the facts’ guy, and he covers such things as how far apart windmills have to go, how much space they take up, intermittency and so on.
It is really simply ridiculous to be teaching children the stuff you quote.
Sorry, if 3000 generate 1% reliably (which they do not) then to do double our requirements we would of course need 600,000 of the things! How long has it taken to install Sheringham Shoal? And that is only 88 turbines.
Why is it that when it comes to climate and windpower, people totally lose their critical faculties? You just cannot get there from here. Any more than we could run our existing structure, malls, suburbs, trucking, commuting, on horseback.
AleaJactaEst says:
January 31, 2011 at 10:57 pm
I envy you. Here in the dear old USA, neither teachers nor books encourage students to ask questions and make up their own minds about climate change. I dare not question orthodoxy for fear of causing harm to my child. Of course, here in the USA, another factor comes into play and that is that students do not take their teachers seriously. “It’s in one ear and out the other,” as the old folks say.
It seems to me that traditional English culture remains healthy “underneath,” so to speak. I don’t think that you suffer under the weight of Political Correctness as we do. For example, one of the pleasures of reading Montford’s blog is reading the street language. A popular phrase at this time is “stitched up” or “It was a stitch up.” Apparently that is what the BBC just did to Monckton. Here in the USA, if one uses slang then one is immediately suspicious and must be tested on all points of diversity, inclusiveness, tree-huggingness, you name it.
Oh how we WANT snow in central Texas! School is closed today…but no snow.
Pre-storm note from New Hampshire:
My wife is off to New Mexico a day early. Pity about losing the early booking low fare. The dog is unhappy that one of her humans left.
I have both snowboards out and a 4′ yard stick next to the 2′ snow stake that, at 18″, will be completely buried tomorrow.
Cars positioned to make it easier for the (new) snow blower.
Space to put the snow.
An employer that lets me work from home.
I’m ready. The dog, however, is going to be more unhappy – the current snow cover is deeper than she is tall….
One reason I live in New Hampshire is because I like snow storms. Yay!
Fahrenheit and Celsius are a bit like languages. When in the US, speak Yankee. When in France speak French. When on the Internet speak whatever language you want. Jayman should simply apply a bit of common sense in his interpretations of informal online commentary originating from a US blog.
Personally, being Australian I use Celsius. But Fahrenheit units are roughly half the size of Celsius. So when you get towards the human end of temperature sensations, Fahrenheit is actually more precise, if only in an idiomatic way. The difference between, say, 21c and 25c is far less nuanced than the gradation between 69f and 77f.
Temperature sensations are a bit like scents. They can trigger past memories…Of exactly where you were the last time the air rang like crystal yet the snow swallowed all sounds whole. I still remember being ten years old in a Catskill Mountain winter. It was Fahrenheit all the way down then.
Demanding that everyone speak one language, is well, dumb.
Wakarimasuka?
We are in the 18″- 36″ band.
Got 4″
We’ll see how Part II goes.
AleaJactaEst
The following NETA site gives the fuel types which provide electricity for the UK as well as total daily production. Wind installed capacity is said to be 4.2 GW. Interestig reading for Dec.- Jan. particularly when you look at the interconnectors from France and Ireland.
http://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/~dcurtis/NETA.html
Hope that is useful in demonstrating the futility of relying on wind, not to mention cost and back-up requirements.
E.M.Smith says:
February 1, 2011 at 2:21 am
Yep. The wet stuff returns mid February. It was biting cold on the hands today until the sun finally popped out of the mountain fog at 2pm.
The Sierras are due for thier 10-year Easter Surprise.
Like Ric Werme, I’m here in New Hampshire in the bullseye of snowzilla (one of those red patches on Ryan Maue’s map). My carbon belching snowblower is ready to go, and I wisely stocked up on 100 40 lb bags of pellets for my carbon belching pellet stove, so I’m all set. They’re calling for anywhere from 16″ – 24″ once this is all over on Thursday. Snow day tomorrow for the kids for sure, and I’ll probably work from home.
I’d post one of those ridiculous CAGW scare stories from the recent past on how the New England skiing industry was going to be devastated due to lack of snow because of global
warmingclimate changeclimate disruption, but I think everyone gets the point by now…don’t mess with Mother Nature!As of last night they were predicting an awful storm around here, prompting 500 school districts in three states to delay or cancel school. I know it’s getting pretty bad north and east of us, but I walked outside this morning and thought, “They delayed school for this??” If I were the superintendents, I’d be pretty angry. You expect your weather reports to be accurate so you can make a decision in the best interests of your students. As a parent, I’m mighty angry, because these delays wreak havoc on my entire day. Now, if there’s six inches of snow, that’s one thing. But when it’s a dusting or because it’s 10 degrees, I mind. I blame the media; they hype up every little storm so that we’re terrified to drive in an inch of snow, and schools don’t want to be liable if something happens so they delay or cancel over every little thing. This is PA, folks, and guess what? It snows. A lot. And it gets cold. Really cold. We act like we’ve never seen snow before. Sheesh.
Dallas reporting in.
I’ve never heard “thundersleet” before…
ew-3 at 11:21 pm:
“red target zone in MA, … We have about 24 on the ground, and another 20 coming. :(”
I used to live in the Boston burbs, and for a couple years the lawn would disappear under snow in October and reappear in March. In New Hampshire, I recall the snow being piled up as much as 4 to 6 feet around many parking lots and driveways. Now we’re getting that below the Mason-Dixon line.
The storm is in Oklahoma, and already a layer of freezing rain on the roads here in western MD, 1200 miles away.
And before the warmunists start w/the “warm oceans = snow” crud, the Gulf of Mexico & SE coast waters where the moisture comes from is well below avg in temp.
To the above BBC page, one advantage of “age” relative to “youth” is now occurring. Living north of St. Louis in west central Illinois, I do remember large snow storms and winters such as this one in the late 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. Hum, cold PDO. My granddad talked about heavy snow in his youth, he was born in 1901. Hum, cold PDO, low solar cycle. In the central U.S. we are indeed seeing weather. As for changing climate, speaking as a geologist, the only constant in climate is change.