Mount Joy Snowman

Back to some current weather talk......gonna be a beautiful few days, high pressure in control, enjoy it boys! (or ladies if there are any lurking out there)

Oh don't I know it, but MDT seems to be a particularly egregious example of it.

It really is haha, and just generally, even prior to that period, it seemed like a complete shit show of record keeping for Harrisburg. Aye aye aye.

Clear as mud haha.....also here is my favorite part, so basically we weren't getting accurate snow measurements at MDT until 2010 sheesh..... ASOS was commissioned on March 31st, 1995, which brings us to the present. The ASOS unit was placed at a distance of approximately 600 meters northwest of the KMDT tower. ASOS does not measure snow and for years the maintenance department measured snow to keep the snow records/climatology going. The maintenance people were busiest during snow storms though, and the measurements were low on their list of priorities. Therefore, the measurements were often taken well after the last flakes had fallen and the wind had increased enough to make measuring the new snow fall difficult. The measurements were, at times, unreliable as a result. On February 8th, 2010, the Observing Program Leader from the National Weather Service (NWS) Weather Forecast Office (WFO) in State College (CTP) provided the equipment and the training necessary to the FAA-contracted weather office in the Middletown Tower and the reliability of snowfall measurements returned. The HIA/KMDT site is the current Local Climatological Data (LCD) site for Harrisburg, PA.

Found it! https://www.weather.gov/media/ctp/ClimateStationHistory/Harrisburg LCD Site History.pdf

Oh yes I completely believe their readings, just frustrated that a microclimate like that with a number of unusual influences gets to be the official record keeper and climate bearer of our entire local region. It's just not very representative of the region at-large, but hey, nothing we can do about it.

Indeed it is usually the lows that run high. I posted an article a while back detailing the history of the Harrisburg climate site and just how much it's moved around, will have to see if I can find it.

The other annoying thing with MDT.........take last night for instance, which seemed to be a bit of an inversion night and explains why I dropped to 48 despite some stations right near me but higher up only hitting ~52, and why @mahantango#1 dipped to 42. Well, MDT would normally be a perfect spot to capture those inversion temps, being so low-lying right off the ridges and all, but it seems to be completely negated by some combo of the damn airport/river presence. All I know is they always stay warmer than surrounding locations, always. I digress....

It really is. I bottomed out at 48 here at a low spot in Lancaster, which looks to be the same as KLNS and KRDG. Heck, even Capital City hit 48 for a brief 5-minute interval and spent a good bit of time at 50. Gotta love that MDT represents our "official" climate to the world. I know it's been beaten to death but it really is frustrating.

Looks like most around us got ~1/4”. I’m sitting at .21”.

No direct hits from anything noteworthy here, looks like about .07” in the gauge.

Weekend Summary: .22" of rain and roughly 3,000 ounces of beer consumed at the summer party. Success.

Saw that stat, just an unbelievable display of ineptitude all the way around.

It's almost as if having gaggles of people wanting to live in deserts is not a great idea.

I bottomed out at 50 early this morning. Also, I was not yet a warm thought when Agnes occurred.

It really is uncanny some of the extreme weather they’ve recorded up there.

As of 8pm EDT the highest temp for the day was 124 at Death Valley, shocking I know.

I love where your head’s at! But don’t you dare denigrate the county seat of McKean County like that, ‘tis the booming metropolis of the Route 6 corridor haha.

Yes it has an obscene high elevation desolate arid inversion microclimate. Not really fair to be comparing it to most “normal” locations haha.

Sorry for the errant posts but what I was trying to display was copied text from the WPC about the national high and low temp for the contiguous United States, which had Death Valley, CA and Stovepipe Wells, CA both reaching 118 and Peter Sinks, UT hitting 27.

Edit: I don't know what's happening, tried from mobile but that didn't work either, whatever...

That would have made her tied for tops in the nation, wow.......sidebar, Peter Sinks seems to always take the low title ha..... Edit: for some reason it's not displaying the text I had pasted into my reply about the national high/low data. Anybody else ever have this problem with copying and pasting from websites?

Man this upcoming stretch of weather looks absolutely gorgeous, might keep my windows open for four days straight.

I matched ya, eight hundredths here as well. Yeah not much of anything substantial in the forecast, except of course possibly Saturday which is the day of our annual summer party ugh, but even that doesn't look like like anything more than scattered.

Yeah it's kind of wild for what was really a more stratiform type rain to have that type of sharp cutoff but that's exactly what happened and the fault line fell right over our area. A couple miles to my south near Mountville people got 2 inches or more and just a couple miles to my north around Mount Joy the tallies were more in your neighborhood of a half inch to an inch. The radar estimates of total precip were wildly off as well, as much of it came via low clouds that the radar had trouble picking up, particularly around our area with it's notorious radar hole and all.