Silver Meteor

March 5th - 9th in 1962. The Great Atlantic Coastal Storm. I remember it and saw the aftermath a month later. (Yes, I'm old as dirt - born 1951.) Far as I know a once in recorded history event?

Congratulations on the heavy snow. Over here in Greenville it's been nothing but light snow all evening as we're swimming in a river of the driest air of all the radars. A fine powder blowing around but scant little accumulation. It's pathetic.

I recommend Isaac Asimov's essay "The Relativity of Wrong." It's a fantastic short work and I'm sure you (and everyone else here) would love it.

How the heck can New Bern get 8" with Greenville up the road only 2"? I can't imagine a gradient like that here on the coastal plain for such a short distance but of course anything's possible. When's the last time you got 8" down there?

I wonder what the accuracy is for a mercury barometer?

Bet this wasn't on anyone's bingo card to ever be seen from a weather office discussion... From Brownsville, Texas: Surf will be highest overnight into tomorrow morning as we experience gale forced winds offshore. Due to cold sea surface temperatures, there is high potential for mass sea turtle cold stunning in the area as well. Motorists crossing coastal bridges will need to watch for pelicans.

The formative stage is there. A clear wind shift and showers starting along the Tex/Mex border.

Starting as a mainframe operator in the early '70s I worked my way up to programmer then applications analyst. I ended up a contractor at NAVSEA in Crystal City then left the computer world entirely in the late '80s. It's been fascinating seeing the continued development of this field from the outside where one quickly becomes a dinosaur. Note: Before any of that my "work" was as an airman sitting at a large air defense console connected to the largest computer ever built (250 tons using 3 megawatts of electricity.) That was the "Q7" a NORAD computer whose existence was long unknown to the public. Each control center (mine was HQ 20th Air Division at Ft. Lee, Va. for defense of the Southeast U.S. (Chesapeake Bay to Key West and inland to the Mississippi River)) had a pair of them. They were incredible machines! https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/AN/FSQ-7_Combat_Direction_Central

Seems a decent Low but the track isn't useful for us:

Laugh or perhaps cry ... The cold has been relentless here in Greenville, NC and always with a breeze to make it worse. Nights are frigid and my electric bill has gone up like a rocket. All this with zero payoff ... Have yet to see the first snowflake.

A reminder how amazingly wrong even the best of models can be at medium to long range. Here is the ECMWF one week ago today:

I moved from Wilmington to Greenville in 2013 and have been amazed by the lack of snow here, scant little more than I saw in Wilmington from 2003 to 2013. Am I cursed?

Discussion for Eastern North Carolina covers two scenarios including a 20% possibility of blizzard conditions at Cape Hatteras: https://forecast.weather.gov/product.php?site=MHX&issuedby=MHX&product=AFD&format=CI&version=1&glossary=1&highlight=off

https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2025/01/why-la-wildfires-have-little-to-with.html

Son of a gun, found this slush wave pic from Delaware in my files.

The winter of 76-77 does seem to be a once in a lifetime event (and not typical of some "era.") I was 25 years old and living in Maryland that winter, one like none I'd ever seen before or seen since, three months of perpetual cold. There's a video clip from that winter with waves of slush rolling into the Delaware beaches. Who knows what freaks of nature lie ahead in the coming years and decades.

34/23 up the road here in Greenville, NC. Notice that heavy stuff on radar heading our way. We about to get a sleet bomb?

Every other area? Don't forget there's a huge chunk of N.C. east of I-95. That you so rarely hear from us is ... well, you know why.

The years blur at my age (73) but I was living in Fenwick Island, DE (a stone's throw above the MD state line) around that time and boy did we have a storm, a full-on blizzard. The wind roared in from the ocean with heavy snow blowing sideways. At the height of the storm with visibility down to zero the governor ordered the snow plows to halt. The snow drifted to above the top of my front door yet there were bare patches of ground in my yard. It was like that everywhere in the neighborhood. I don't recall the year precisely but I'll absolutely never forget that storm.

Down here in Eastern N.C. it got up to 50F today but with a dewpoint of -4F giving us a relative humidity of just 10%!

Well, I have found one solution ... logging in to this site on Windows Explorer instead of Firefox. Been on the internet since the 1990s and using Firefox for an awfully long time and never seen this before. Leave it to a cat to find such a bizarre feature (selectively altering the resolution on just one website, and permanently at that) which effectively I'd call a bug given it didn't ask me if I really wanted it. Thank you to everyone who took a shot at it.

Hello. I've searched the site high and low and can't find anything to control the screen resolution here. My cat stepped on my keyboard and now I can barely read anything as the resolution shot up making everything here so tiny. This is happening ONLY on this website as the rest of my computer is normal. Would appreciate any help, thank you.

Aha! That does make sense. Ophelia came later and was a good one that had much better shape. The eye wall took all afternoon to move through. I have very few images of storms from Wilmington but possibly this one is Charley? I remember clearly the front half was very weak, so weak in fact I was wondering where in the heck is this hurricane? It was the backside right rear that had all the power. (I've no idea what that squiggle is on the image.)

Charley Part II My first full year in North Carolina, Wilmington was my new home after leaving Maryland. Then a Cat 1, Charley was a direct hit with the eye passing overhead. The front half eye wall was solid and easily visible from my apartment while the right rear, fully open with lots of blue sky, was oddly enough the strongest part of the storm. I saved a radar image from the time: