Snowciopathic Snow Bro

Who knew that it would take a glacier to bust a drought?

I was laughing this off as some delusional one-off model run, but I just checked and the GFS has been remarkably consistent on out of band low temps for Tuesday morning. You can go back to runs initialized from Jan 21st and the warmest low temps in its depicted cold pocket just southwest of DC metro is -8!!!

Stevie Wonder was their celebrity guest observer today.

Normal for them. Frankly I'm shocked they didn't report partly cloudy and 72F.

The storm is over in Gainesville.

Impressive for sure. Very much a one-off event for these parts. At least it's not road salt. I wouldn't put it past some of these transportation departments to dump that much on the roads.

What roads?

That was my big fear going into this storm, but I'm only concerned if I see it accreting on trees. According to LWX, amounts should be light. Fortunately most of the QPF is done at this stage.

Watching the Patriots - Broncos bash, looks like Denver is stealing our wraparound snow! Thieves!!!!

Cold temps sure don't help. Makes metal more brittle. How old was the spring? Imagine if they didn't have restraining cables threaded through them. Those are lifesaving devices that most people don't give a second thought to until one of them explodes.

Aye. I've been here 30 years and there have been times I feel I've spent half my life trying to get through there, especially before they reengineered it.

Traffic camera at Linton Hall and U.S. 29 in Gainesville. For those who aren't familiar with the area, this interchange is normally heavily traveled and frequently congested (much like 10,000 other places in the region, lol). Looks like the covid era redux today.

Certainly a little bit of a different slant on the "Hold my beer" axiom!

LWX AFD just released. https://forecast.weather.gov/product.php?site=LWX&issuedby=LWX&product=AFD&format=txt&version=1&glossary=1 Some of the ZR highlights:

Good lord that's quite the warm punch into WV. Mountain areas are well into the warm layer aloft. Used to seeing those thermal profiles reversed between the coastal plain and mountains.

It looks similar to nerve cell synapses. You should print and frame it.

Either I've been drinking too much, or I need to get the hell out of this neighborhood.

Mine is set at 73 and it's running for 45 minutes every hour. I've got a damper issue (can't access it without destroying a ceiling) that is shunting a lot of the air up to the 2nd story, plus the thermostat is mounted on the wall to the garage. Not exactly the ideal gas law here.

Home Depot and Lowes gonna have to start marketing sleetblowers instead of snowblowers now.

If my furnace could talk it'd be saying:

Good point. I was basically looking at only my back yard (Data Center Land, I mean Gainesville) for the various model runs. NAM doesn't skimp on the ZR for some other areas.

The HRRR also loves it some ZR on the back end of this event. Looks like 4 hours worth. Seems like a bit of an outlier compared to NAM and others. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Now that you mention the blue hue, I concur. Thought I was seeing things when shoveling earlier. Very fleeting, but a strange phenomenon.

Just finished the 1st round of shoveling. More of an exploratory foray than anything serious. My rule is shovel until I start sweating. This stuff has some real gravitas to it...deceivingly so. It's powdery but weighty. Thinly covered areas can simply be swept, but moving larger accumulations off the flat surfaces of vehicles and walkways takes some effort. The accumulated sleet certainly changes the shoveling calculus. Sleet continues falling and is noisy as all get out. Just happy it ain't ZR. Gainesville, 16F air. Moderate sleet. 4" total sleet+snow on the deck table, but it plays like it's double that.

Gainesville: 15F air temp; dewpoint unknown as my venerable wx station gave up the ghost on that score. 3.9" of snow/sleet OTG. The changeover to sleet here seemed to occur right around 10z. I'm very pleased to report that there is zero snow stickage to trees. If we get any ice accretion later today from potential ZR (current NWS forecast < 0.1" ZR), at least there's no extra weight of snow on branches that'll be a factor. Sleet is harmless in this regard and simply bounces. We'll be very appreciative of this come tomorrow when winds are progged to gust to 30 mph. Anything that helps us keep the power on through this upcoming frigid week is a plus in my book. So time to sit back, relax, and enjoy the NFL conference championship games later today. I'll worry about shoveling this mess later. Maybe have a nice meal today, too, as long as there's someone in the house that'll take my trident.