gravitylover

Well that was fun. Huge wind, big noise and no apparent damage. Frozen rather than muddy ground made all the difference, I haven't been out yet but I don't see any trees down out the windows.

That station is just a few miles south of me and situated similarly to me. It's exposed to the E/ESE and on a hillside. The numbers for other stations within a short distance are more similar to Brewster's 51. Most of the area is high 50s maxes but I'll tell you, it was roaring. My wife and kids were sitting in downstairs doorways because they were afraid we were going to have a tree land on the house. Temp and exposure. Up here on the hills and ridges it was impressive. A quick visual scan of my property looks like I got lucky, just a few large branches down. Gonna go charge up the battery for the chainsaw and have some Christmas fun later.

I tried to be so optimistic but the storm just wouldn't listen

The snow is going away in a hurry but really warm air, fog and hot rain for hours will do that

It's been on and off breezy all day and now it's a steady light rain. I saw as high as 56* earlier, it's down a few degrees now to about 50 around the area.

I have friends that headed to their other house in Windham. They're a block from downtown with the creek running through their backyard. I warned them not to go but they didn't seem to care. I think I'm going to call them again now and tell them to make sure the second floor has bottled water and some food so when they have to go up there they're ready for the duration.

Up a little over 10 degrees already since midnight. There's no wind but you can feel a general warmth moving, it's weird but I feel it in the exposed front yard and in the sheltered backyard it's still cold and the snow is still crusted over. How high is the temp going to get here today? Do we see 65 (again on Christmas Eve)? Big temp spreads are cool. Looks like it's gonna get messy overnight. Batten down kidz.

Thanks Walt. I really wanted to get a good view of that conjunction last night but was barely able to see it through the thin clouds. I'm so disappointed, only got to see one celestial event for the whole year due to weather

Throughout the Taconic range microclimate differences are pretty dramatic. I'll see temp swings within a few hundred vertical feet that are more similar to what you'd see for 1k or more in other ranges. Generally you figure 7* per 1k feet but here I'll see up to 10* in under 1k, sometimes well under depending on additional factors like JC mentioned. I could easily call yesterday .5" if the measurement can be taken on bushes or things like fence rails. Most hard surfaces had at least .25" and at one point the flake size got huge and it built up quickly but compacted almost immediately as the rate slowed so a very dense quarter inch coating is my call. So what are we realistically looking at for Friday? I need to make the decision by tomorrow morning about whether we pick up my (95 year old) father in law to bring him here for dinner/lunch or if the weather is gonna suck and I don't want to have be out later that day to bring him home. The decision has to be made early because the facility he lives in needs to deal with staffing and such and we need to cancel his private aide (that costs a fkn fortune on holidays).

It snowed nicely for a few hours, put down a fresh whitening coat of probably a quarter inch. The roads stayed wet, too much salt Looks and feels like winter.

Steady light snow for a while now, it was tiny flakes for the first hour but picked up a few minutes ago and it's accumulating now. 31/26 wind generally out of the east and light. Very nice mood snow for sure.

Berkshire East too. I want to do a tour of places like those and Upstate NY is filled with them. It won't happen this year but it needs to happen soon. Another good sized area popped onto my radar this year, Bristol, and with all the extra time I ended up going down the google maps rabbit hole and sorta laid out a trip. If you could hit it on the right weather cycle there are some pretty kickass powder areas around NY like Bristol or McCauley that fly under the radar even better than the New England areas other than a couple. Pico is great, totally gets you that high peaks experience but at this point you'd be more likely to find me at Middlebury Snow Bowl, another one of those killer powder hills.

I love that place.

I saw +4 at KDXR but nothing lower than 12 within a few miles of my house.

Ha! Don't worry, it's wrong

Here it's 4-6* below forecasted highs.

It's not going to be a cutter/rainstorm. This is one of those years where it wants to snow. Watch...

This new NWS radar product sucks.

I'm whining about my hands after shoveling for over 2 hours and you guys are hurtin' after snowblowing? I have what, 10 years on most of you... Yeah I went there.

Oh and my hands fkng hurt from hours of shoveling. I bet I'm gonna be sore by the morning.

Pack building? Yeah, I don't see it. Looks warmish and dry for a while. I did move the snowbanks as far back as I could just in case though I was so right about how that long duration wind direction would affect the snowfall amounts here, a few miles west along the Taconic spine got significantly more than I did and IMO it's all due to the exposure and duration. It certainly isn't because it saw a band that the rest of the region didn't since the higher amounts are only along the easterly faces and fall off immediately as you pass to the west. I didn't expect how dramatically the amounts fell off going E and SE but I'm not all that surprised as it seems to happen that way pretty often.

A few miles made a huge difference here. I went for a drive and I got right about a foot, 3-4 miles west got at least 4-6" more than I did and 4 miles east is easily 4" less. The combination of elevation and exposure was the determining factor in how much you ended up with. As you go east it drops off pretty quickly and is much more sheltered, west of me you head into the Taconic high country and I live on a standalone hill in between. The sheltering below me sometimes helps in windy storms but not this time and west of me it ramps up and catches the snow when the wind is out of the ENE/NNE for so many hours as does my hill. I went through a few spots along the spine that were easily 16" and the banks along the roads are a foot higher than on my hill while east the snowbanks peter out to almost nothing pretty quickly. Danbury seems to have gotten about the same foot as I did but it's much denser and has set up and compressed down to 6-8" in most places. The wraparound snow at the end gave me another 1.5-2" and covered up the bare ground and grass that was showing on northeasterly exposures that the sind had scoured clean all night so that was nice. This was a rare storm where my winds stayed out of the ENE/NNE the entire time and they're still persistently staying out of that direction so the temp dropped of quickly. It popped up to 30-32 under bright sun but is down to 22 and dropping fast.

Snow is done finally, cloud deck is thinning and the wind is over. Ended with about a foot, tough to measure when it goes from bare ground to 3' deep within just a few feet. Half of my front lawn still has grass showing and the other half goes up to 2' so, yeah... That warm layer made a mess, I would almost definitely have made it to 15+ without the weight and density of sleet and pellets compressing the pack. Good storm, I'll take 3 or 4 more just like it. See what ya can do about that would ya

With the extra fluff this morning I definitely got to a foot. Good storm. Another 3 or 4 like this and I'll be happy.

Tough to call it 12" but it's definitely more than 8. I was spot on with the pack compressing sleet/pellet mix and my overall depth call. For such a cold storm this is some dense stuff and it's still coming down at about .5"/hr. I had drifts almost 3' deep just feet from bare ground. There's no way to get decent measurements with this storm.