WVclimo

Just came in from a long walk. That wind is pretty fierce. NW 21 G33. 36 degrees.

High of 61 after a low of 20. Only see a 40-degree spread like that a few times a year.

Mt. Washington recorded a 231 mph gust, the highest wind speed recorded in the US and the world to that point, on April 12, 1934. Still holds the US record, but an island site off of western Australia recorded 253 in a tropical cyclone. Don’t know what their lowest wind chill is though.

Getting a few flurries. 39/30. Wind NW 19 G31. Guess this qualifies as a Lion?

Early grade is a B. We will see if March changes that at all. An 8.7" snowfall in mid-Dec helped the season score higher. The 7th double-digit snowfall since 2006 at the beginning of Feb (11.9") did also. Longest period of snow cover here since 2014. Drawback is no real cold spells or very low temperatures. 6th snowiest winter in the 15 years I've been here: 2009-10: 82.9” 2013-14: 52.4” 2015-16: 40.8” 2018-19: 37.0” 2014-15: 36.7” 2020-21: 33.2” (so far)

Rain is moving away. 1.20" storm total

Wind advisory posted for later today for gusts up to 50 mph.

Rivers and creeks in our region are either flooding now or expected to in the next 36 hours. Including mainstream rivers.

Last of the snow cover in my garden that’s been on the ground since 1/31

In 1995, I dropped a couple grand on an HP Pavilion 5030 desktop “multimedia” computer. It featured an Intel Pentium 75MHz processor, 8MB RAM, and an 850MB hard drive. With the 14.4kbps dialup, it took about 10-12 minutes to load one model map. I remember waiting for hours late one night to see all the parameters on the ETA run leading up to the ‘96 blizzard.

In rural areas where phone lines had not yet reached full penetration, party line service was offered as a subscription. These were lines that serviced anywhere from 5-20 households. Each subscriber had their own dedicated ring. At our house, one long ring followed by two short rings meant a call was coming for us. A neighbor would have a different ring sequence, so you didn’t answer those. Since it wasn’t a private line, if you picked up the phone you could listen to others’ conversations. Etiquette said that if you broke into the conversation to announce you had to make an urgent call, the other parties would wrap up their call.

Absolutely I remember. Used to frustrate me that I wasn’t able to see it with our B&W TV. We were a typical family though. It wasn’t until 1972 when a majority of the TV sets sold in the US were Color TVs. My folks bought one a year later, a 15” floor model, for $300.00. It was a big deal for us.

When I was young, before the cable came to our area, we could pick up one TV channel clearly: WJAC channel 6 from Johnstown, PA. It was an NBC affiliate. We also had a party line telephone. It rang all the time, but only some of those calls were for us. If you picked up the phone you could hear others’ conversations. If you needed to make a call, you could ask the others to relinquish the line. Sometimes they did. A lot of times they didn’t.

Looks like a potentially significant flooding event for W Md and the high ground of eastern WV tomorrow. Couple inches of rain and temps in the 50's with all the liquid contained in that snowpack is gonna raise the rivers and creeks dramatically. Good day to chase waterfalls, but hopefully not a bad one for some of those valley towns. From the FFW:. ...Periods of moderate to heavy rain may fall on a deep primed snowpack leading to increasing melt. Flows in rivers may increase quickly and reach critical levels...

Warm air staying away from here so far. 55 in Elkins, 50 in Front Royal, 45 in Winchester. 39 and foggy in my yard. Forecast high is 57.