09-10 analogy

9" in upper NW. I'm sure there's been some compaction, so more than that has probably fallen. Doesn't really matter; it's a dynamite storm. Just walked over to Whole Foods. Moderate to occasionally heavy snow there and back. DC and environs are rolling all 6's with this one.

Seems to be picking back up. We're gonna close strong I think.

Got my 8", maybe a bit more. Do I hear 10"?

Yeah, this may be the heaviest yet here in Tenleytown as well. Maybe we're under the same band. It feels good to be in the jackpot zone for a change. Even the biggest and best ones ... 2016, 2010, 1996 ... north and west got more. Which, of course, is totally to be expected. But I feel inside the Beltway is keeping pace with just about everyone with this one.

Just so long as Mr. Blonde doesn't show up.

Lightening up a bit now, but it was pounding just a few minutes ago. At 7" now, maybe a wee bit more. Leffe break, then another walk. It is kind of bittersweet for me, though; this is the first snow since she was old enough to go sledding that my daughter didn't want to.

This is getting perilously close to SN+.

Generously endowed flakes coming down quite heavily in up nw. When this band came in, some IP was mixing in, but back to all snow now and the heaviest I've seen today. Might get that magic 8" after all.

Up to 6.25"; a couple of the larger random measures were 6.4" or so. Dubious about how much more I'm going to get, since every promising band (at least according to the COD radar) seems to die off once it hits here. There was a promising snake of a band oriented along the Potomac that was headed my way a couple of ticks ago, but it seems to be expiring as well. This reminds me of Dec 5 2002 actually. Similar accumulation, I think that was primarily a nighttime event. Just in how it's playing out through my eyes, not any kind of meteorological analysis (which I'm not intellectually equipped to do anyway). Hopefully this is the opening act for Epicness: Snowmaggeadon Returns.

6" on the dot in upper NW. Very pretty. EDIT: Some light stuff starting up again. Actually 6" seems a little high, given the other reports around me. Went back out and took a few more measurements, and 5.75" seems more accurate.

Some good stuff on the doorstep .... side streets completely covered now, lt-mod snow that looks to pick up in intensity shortly. I'd say I've packed away my first inch.

Some larger flakes ... still light though ... sidewalks beginning to coat over. Had a salt truck go by my rinky dink sidestreet about an hour ago. If they're salting my street, whatever must they be doing to the main arterials?

These are the tiniest flakes I’ve ever seen. I’d get out my microscope to look at them if I had a microscope handy.

Yeah, flurries in up nw too. Except that they’ve stopped for the nonce.

Always nice to have the local forecast reach double digits, even though I'm not expecting that. But 8" seems eminently possible. Certainly will put anything since the blizzard to shame.

Two years ago right now -- 1130 or so -- it was really kicking into overdrive. Midday Saturday, it was snowing heavier than I could recall with any other storm with the possible exception of 1983 (which I don't remember that well). Heavier than anything I remembered from 96. I can sympathize with those who prefer Snowpocalypse to the February storms. Snowpocalypse was a delight. Snowmaggeon was an event; the whole 10-day period was almost trial by snow; the stuff kept coming down and, once the majesty of the blizzard was over, the charm began to wear off. But the December snowstorm was perfect in practically every way: the holiday season, the best part of it occurred during daylight hours, cold but not brutally, no sleet, enough wind to keep things interesting, generous accumulations. I was out and about in it a lot more than I was during Snowmaggedon. I remember it more clearly, too, because at the time I was thinking, OK, I better commit every moment to memory because the next one will be, if I'm lucky, at least six years (and not six weeks) away. , As the reality of DC snow climatology reasserts its noxious self, that winter just seems more and more surreal.

By the time I'd registered it as an earthquake, it was over. My impressions of it can't be separated from the points of reference I was using in real time to filter the experience. So it's hard to be totally objective about what I felt at the time; it really was something very unique because I have no antecedents to the experience of having the structure around me shake like hell for a couple of seconds. You experience a wind gust of 70 MPH, your point of reference can be a wind gust of 20; a heat index of 122, well heat indicies of 105 happen just about summer around here -- hell, you can get that in a sauna. But out of nowhere, a house staring to shudder like it's got a fever that breaking -- that's a bit of an outlier in my life and, I imagine, in the lives of millions of people around here who've never put in time in earthquake zones. There was a sound that crescendoed just when the "violent" -- yeah, that's the proper word to use, I don't need the Mercalli scale to tutor me on how to use the language -- vibration began. What made it violent wasn't the intensity of the shaking but that it was so unexpected and (in my experience) unprecedented. In retrospect, my attention was arrested by three things: how the chair I was sitting in shook , how the windows rattled, and how my elderly dog slept through the whole thing. In the immediate aftermath, I wondered if in fact it was an earthquake, because I looked to the dog for validation and he was snoring away as if nothing had happened. There was a brief nanosecond when I wondered whether I'd somehow imagined the whole thing, or that maybe my mail was being delivered by a Gorgon.

You win the internets.

My 16 year old beagle slept right through it. The other dog wasn't particularly impressed by it, either.

Top that, Irene.

So I'm not crazy. It was about 10 second. I wondered WTF and by the time I thought it was an earthquake, it was over. Rattled the windows.

Most fatalities in one year since 1953, as well.

PRELIMINARY LOCAL STORM REPORT...CORRECTED NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE MORRISTOWN TN 520 PM EDT THU APR 28 2011 .TIME... ...EVENT... ...CITY LOCATION... ...LAT.LON .DATE... ....MAG.... ..COUNTY LOCATION..ST.. ...SOURCE. ..REMARKS.. 1056 PM TORNADO CAMP CREEK 36.09N 82.77W 04/27/2011 GREENE TN EMERGENCY MNGR *** 10 FATAL, 33 INJ *** EF2. NEAR CAMP CREEK WHICH CAUSED SIGNIFICANT STRUCTURAL DAMAGE AND SEVERAL FATALITIES AND NUMEROUS INJURIES. MAX WIND SPEED 115 MPH. It's not surprising that to rack up such a ghastly fatality count as yesterday, there has to be some very bad luck contributing along with violent, long-track, mile-wide tornadoes. How many EF2s cause double-digit deaths? Sure it's happened before but for every EF2 that causes multiple deaths, there must be hundreds (?) that don't even injure anyone. But wrong place at the right time, and all that ...

If that Alabama total is correct, that would be the greatest loss of life in a single state from an outbreak since Indiana in 1965. No state affected by the Superoutbreak had deaths in the triple digits.