March 27, 2014

That Was the Winter That Was

Satellite Time-Lapse Movie Shows U.S. East Coast Snowy Winter | NASA "The once-per-day imagery creates a stroboscopic slide show of persistent brutal winter weather," said Dennis Chesters of the NASA/NOAA GOES Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. who created the animation.
To create the video and imagery, NASA/NOAA's GOES Project takes the cloud data from NOAA's GOES-East satellite and overlays it on a true-color image of land and ocean created by data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS, instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites. Together, those data created the entire picture of the storm and show its movement. After the storm system passes, the snow on the ground becomes visible.

According to NOAA's National Weather Service (NWS), as of the first day of spring Washington, D.C. had received 30.3 inches of snow for the 2013-2014 winter season. Washington's average winter snowfall is 15.3 inches, so the snowfall for the Nation's Capital was almost double that, exceeding it by 15.0 inches. An early spring snow on March 25 is expected to add to that total.
Further north in Boston, Mass. snowfall totals were even higher. The NWS reported that since July 1, 2013, 58.6 inches of snow had fallen in Boston. The average snowfall is 40.8 inches, so Boston was 17.8 inches over normal snowfall.

The big snow story this winter has been across the Great Lakes region which has also seen record amounts of snowfall. According to NWS in Buffalo, the city has received 121.7 inches, or more than 10 feet of snow, as of March 24. Chicago has received 80 inches of snow which is more than double their annual snowfall amount of 34.4 inches.

Posted by gerardvanderleun at March 27, 2014 1:16 PM
Bookmark and Share

Comments:

HOME

"It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood." -- Karl Popper N.B.: Comments are moderated and may not appear immediately. Comments that exceed the obscenity or stupidity limits will be either edited or expunged.

Winter, although technically gone, still has some bite. You are not out of the woods yet. We have had 12+ inch snow storms in April. I won't declare it to be over until May.

Posted by: Fat Man at March 27, 2014 2:47 PM

Our "Winter" just west of Rapid City started on 3-4 Oct with a blizzard and 36in of heavy, wet snow that killed over 30K head of cattle & bison in SW SD/panhandle of NE. It was crippling to ranchers hereabouts. We lost power for 72 hours. That followed our last snowstorm in midApril 2013. (That's 5.5 months between snowstorms. Think about that.) I've moved more snow, just this season, than I can remember, since moving out here from Virginia in 2009. But this is "flyover country" and I could _never_ go back. Thank God we moved. Oh! Thank God!! (McAuliffe & Co. & ClintonMachine be damned.)

chuck

Posted by: dhmosquito at March 27, 2014 4:24 PM

I'n not sure how much more of this global warming I can handle.

Posted by: Grizzly at March 27, 2014 5:35 PM

We don't know it now, but when we look back 50~100 years from now, we will regard 2014 as the start of the next Ice Age. It's been happening since the world was new; 100-120 thousand years of ice, 10-15 thousand years of warm. Over and over again.

The current warm period started about 13,000 years ago. We're due. Winter is coming and all that nonsense about CO2 will not stop it.

There will be an El Nino later this year that will get all the Global Warming boys fired up, but after that, the temp always falls. Expect a few decades of cold at the very best.

Posted by: SteveS at March 27, 2014 7:46 PM

Reminds me a lot of some of the winters in the 70s. Buffalo was often closed by snow. I landed there one day and it looked like we were landing on a glacier. The runway was just an icy streak in the snow. It appears we are heading back into a few such winters.

Posted by: Jimmy J. at March 27, 2014 10:22 PM

I remember those winters in the 1970s. Buffalo got over 200 inches of snow one year, if memory serves, and people were shoveling snow off of their roofs so that the roofs wouldn't collapse.

Equinox to equinox, this past extended winter was the coldest in 102 years. But I know that the next hot day will lead to more global warming horror stories. I swear that if St. Louis were being ground to dust under a mile thick glacier, these idiots would still be screaming about global warming.

Posted by: physics geek at March 28, 2014 7:17 AM

But don't forget, the UN just declared this to be the 6th WARMEST winter on record.

It's not that the climate models are wrong, it's the planet that's wrong.

Posted by: Bla at March 28, 2014 9:44 AM