After big snow and ice events in the Southeast, Plains, and Midwest this week, 49 out of the 50 states currently have snow on the ground – yes, even Hawaii, where snow falls in Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea all winter.
The only state that has avoided this icy blast is Florida. Does that make you want to go on a nice, warm vacation to the Sunshine State? You're not alone.
Put another way, that means snow is present in 69.4 percent of the lower 48, which is more than double than December. This is extremely unusual, though it's hard to put a date on when this last happened because records aren't kept on this kind of event.
The National Operational Hydrologic Remote Sensing Center combines ground reports and images from satellites in space to determine how much of the country is covered in snow. That's what you see in the image above. The images tell how deep and widespread the snow is, and that's important not only for images like this one, but also for computer weather models, which use the data to generate accurate forecasts. Such forecasts were very useful in predicting this week's winter storms.
Earlier this week, two storms began to churn: one in the northern Plains and Midwest, and one in Texas. The southern winter storm took a track across the Gulf Coast, pulling warm, moist air over an extreme arctic blast that set up over the eastern half of the United States late last week. This provided fuel for the storm to carve a path of snow, sleet, and freezing rain from Texas to the Carolinas.
Here in Atlanta, we're still coated in snow and ice and probably will be for the next couple of days. No one in the Southeast escaped the wrath except, of course, Florida.
But it's not over. Now that the southern-track storm has moved into the Atlantic and is moving north, the other Midwest storm is going to merge with it, creating a Nor'easter event that could dump up to two feet of snow in the Northeast. Winter storm warnings and advisories have been posted for the event - 32 states have winter storm advisories issued, by the way.
Here's how the snow forecast breaks down for some major cities:
Washington DC: 2-4 inches
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: 4-6 inches
New York, N.Y.: 6-12 inches
Hartford, Connecticut: 15-20 inches
Boston, Massachusetts: 12-16 inches
The snow and cold started early this winter and has been extreme for most of the country. Usually the Southeast avoids the blast, but not in 2011. We're all feeling a little "snowed in" this winter.
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what about the other 7 states??
any snow there??
You forgot about the "one left to go"......
I want to know when will news reporters and the weather advisors ask the question WHY are we having this weird weather patterns? All there is coverage of another winter storm forecasts, impacts from the winter storms, and lessons on how to better respond to the next storm [which comes every 2-3 days]. So that covers what, where, when, and how from the famous reporter questions one's ask.
When will someone start asking why is this all happening? Is it b/c the water that melted from the glaciers and ice bergs entered into the water cycle now comes back as falling precipitation during all upcoming seasons? Is it a natural geological cycle heading towards another ice age? Or could it be a consequence of climate change (not just global warming) that we don't want to face?
You can actually just ask the National Weather Service. They have already put out a release months ago that the ocean temperature oscillation has suddenly shifted from last year's El Nino conditions to La Nina conditions. You can look up what La Nina does.
Whether the sudden shift itself, or the magnitude of it is related to other factors, such as climate change, has not yet been established. (because climate is long term average conditions, it is only over the span of several years that we see the statistically significant trends, even if a single winter cannot specifically be linked to the factor)
People are so simple minded... 'it snows here therefore things must be cooling down all over the world.' A) The USA land area covers only a very small fraction of the entire world. B) At the same time we are having a huge hurricane hitting Australia. Hurricanes don't form over cold water, they form over warm water. Clearly it is not cooling down everywhere. C) Increased precipitation (regardless of it being rain or snow) is a sign of warmer waters, not colder ones. Where do you think all that precipitation came from in the first place? It came from increased water evaporation elsewhere. If you have trouble figuring how this works look up the lake effect. D) The rainiest parts of the globe are the equatorial rainforests. And while we associate rain with cold, surely we don't consider rainforests a cold climate, do we?
Great post. I love when people have common sense.
While I agree with most everything you are saying, I would like to point out that it's not cooling down in Australia right now because it is the middle of summer there, so the waters will be warmer. Also, the equatorial rainforests get the most sunlight out of any other place in the planet. This causes two things: water evaporation (as you said) and low pressure systems. The low pressure causes atmospheric lift, lifting the parcipitation into the air, cooling it down forming clouds and rain. The high amounts of rain in that part of the planet are caused by the direct sunlight that those areas get year around. Not disagreeing with you, simply answer the questions.
it's funny to see how angry people get when their eyes are opened for a second by someone else... they start getting out of context LMAO
Well, it looks like the snow was very close to Florida!
So what's a little bit of snow?Big deal. You'll all live!
Is it snowing on Al Gore? ...how inconvenient.
Un articol frumos si bine scris, voi revenii cu siguranta
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