John1122

Had an 8 foot deep mega pothole/sinkhole open in an area roadway this week. There was a huge one in a backyard a couple weeks ago.

2012 ended up being the lowest summer ice extent on record due to a very unfavorable pattern that developed in spring and summer over the Arctic. 2012 at this time of year wasn't remotely the lowest ice extent on record. We are slightly ahead of 2012 right now and overall this winter has seen gains in Arctic ice that easily outpaced average. Currently sea is is ahead of 2019 on this date, well ahead of 2018 on this date, well ahead of 2017 on this date, well ahead of 2016 on this date, ahead of 2015 on this date, ahead of 2014 on this date, roughly tied with 2013 on this date, ahead of 2011 on this date, roughly tied with 2010, behind 2009 and 2008, ahead of 2007, ahead of 2006, ahead of 2005, behind 2004-2001. So in the last 20 years we are currently ahead on Arctic sea ice vs 14 of the 20 years. So the +AO has done pretty good work in the Arctic this year.

.91 in the bucket since around 3am this morning. MRX has most of the area in the 4-6 inch range by Thursday. Not sure that flash flooding will be an issue but a lot of slow rising water issues will happen at that point. I'm now at 8.17 inches of rain already for the month and had 7.35 last month. So already 8 inches or so above normal for 2020.

Not a pretty picture on the 18z GFS Mon-Thurs morning.

WPC day 3 outlook.

Hwy 25w is closed here. 5.14 inches of rain from the event so far. Still raining.

It is absolutely dumping down in buckets out there now with fairly frequent thunder in the area.

Just heard thunder rumble. Snow countdown clock is on.

Extremely heavy rain currently falling. My power just came back on after going out around 4pm. Crossed the 3 inch mark as of 6:15.

Currently at 2.08 inches since Monday evening. Creeks are high and rising and it's pouring down now with a tongue of 3-4 more inches expected through tomorrow. All this coming off the rainiest year ever here, which followed the prior rainiest year ever with the GFS forecasting 12-16 inches of rain for the area over the next 2 weeks. I've had 162 inches of rain in the past 25 months. That's an average of 6.5 inches of rain per month for over 2 consecutive years. That came on the heels of one of the worst droughts we've seen here. The weather is nothing but extremes these days. Extreme warmth, extreme drought, extreme rains, and on the rare times it's managed to get wintry and cold, it was extreme those winters too.

From what I've seen it's been verifying similarly since November or December. It is much warmer than the North American models because they've been ridiculous. the off the chart GEFS had been verifying almost 8 degrees too cold.

Current 90 day model bias. Hopefully these update in the page but maybe not. Won't bother with the Canadian, because they upgraded recently, but the old Canadian was in the 4-5+ degrees top cold at every period from 2-5 through 11-15. The most accurate 2-5 day temp forecast was NWS forecast offices, almost mirrored by GFS MOS. For longer range the Euro Op was best, but the GFS OP is surprisingly better than the Ensembles. The Canadian stunk at every level. Euro Ens GFSENS Euro Op GFS OP

That area is strangely susceptible to tornadoes. They had one on Halloween night. There's been one tornado in my county since 1935 and it was on the ground here for about 1 mile before crossing into Claiborne Co, but Claiborne gets a ton of tornadoes by comparison.

Yep. The tornado history site counted them as Tennessee F5. I believe 3 of the F4 also started outside of Tennessee on there so not sure if they were F4 in the state or not. The other 29 F4 formed in Tennessee.

I believe the tornado history site mistakenly counted this one and one from the April 1974 outbreak that crossed from Northern Alabama into Tennessee.

There have been 92 F3, 32 F4 and 3 F5 in Tennessee.

2.38 inches and pouring down out there right now with some heavy upstream returns coming. Some flooding issues cropping up in the area and creeks are very high.

Now at 1.28 after moderate/heavy rain for the past few hours.

.55 has fallen here so far. I can't imagine we manage a 3rd straight year of much much AN precip.

Yes, that's what happened here a week later. Power line snapping cement with 2 inch per hour rates for 8+ hours. They literally record 3 to 5 inches for 4 straight days at Tri on the official record. That's a big part of why the extremely low snowfall averages are off in our region. Extremely poor quality control. You can't have a remotely accurate 30 year average when you're missing the biggest events of the timeframe. After looking it adds up to 17.6 falling at Tri airport.

It's not right and the maps that accompany them are honestly laughable. As I mentioned, Tri airport goes from 0 snow depth to 13 inches depth on February 2nd-3rd 1996 but has M for snowfall so they don't include it. February 1998, no clue how they missed it. I don't remember it happening how its recorded at Tri, but amounts between 3.4-5.7 inches are recorded over a 4 day span, with something like 18.2 inches falling. But I guess they aren't counting it as one event? No idea honestly. I thought it was a dynamic cooling event that all fell in a shorter time. The Plateau had one a week later with 10-25 inches.

Heavy rain and frequent thunder here. Very windy earlier, but it's died down some in the storm.

After trying to figure how TYS recorded only 8 inches of snow for the February 1st-2nd 1996 event, I went and looked at the hourly data from Feb 1st and 2nd of that year. I recall the snow starting in Knoxville before it did here as it worked it's way South to North, and it had started here by 7-8 pm. Looking back at old news footage at the time, Knox was reporting snow by 8-9 pm as well. This was a cold event with temps in the upper teens to mid 20s in the area. Snow fell in Knox as the temp dropped quickly from 28 at the start to 19. This should have produced higher ratio snows, and that is reflected in observations that are harder to find than the normal big 3 reporting stations you'll find looking at MRX data, which are Tri/Chatt/Tys. On the hourly reports at Knox from Feb 1st freezing precip starts in the form of freezing rain/fog with 10.5 mile vis, and .02 inches of precip fall as freezing rain. The reports then indicated only fog in Knox, but .12 precip falls, then another period with .12 precip falls, this time the temp is in the 20s and the visibility has fallen to 1 mile at observation time. None of this is recorded as snow. Official data says snowfall 0.00, precip .26. I'm 99.9 percent sure that both periods of .12 were in the form of snow. From midnight to 1am on the 2nd, Knoxville records another .12 precip, once again it's labeled as fog. with a visibility of 1 mile. So .36 has fallen at this point, with 0.00 listed as anything but fog. The next observation says snow .13, followed by snow .15. The snow continues with the aforementioned temps falling into the 10s and finally an observed precip amount of .86 falling as snow. The official snowfall is claimed to be 8 inches from that .86, which I think is absolutely wrong based on QPF, temp profiles and observations all around the site. Knoxville had 1.37 fall as frozen but has missing data listed for snowfall and snow depth for the 1st. I figure the .86 with a lot of it falling at temps below 25 would be close to 10 inches on it's own. I'd guess Tys probably actually had 12+ inches of snow like every other station in it's immediate vicinity. But as Carvers mentioned, it's the year of inexplicably missing snowfall data at the big 3 reporting sites from that time frame.

Rogersville reported 17 inches from the storm. So the reports you heard were accurate about heavy snow there.

The data for February at Tri-Cities is still missing, but I found some other reports in scholarly articles and also I found a mention of snowfall at Tri-Cities and Knoxville on a youtube video of live coverage of the event from a Huntsville tv station. I also noticed that even though official records say M on snowfall and list the entire month of February 1996 with 2.9 inches if snowfall at Tri, the snow depth goes from 0 on 1-31-96 to 13 inches on 2-2-96. Then I looked at nearby sites and found the range of snowfall. So in the Tri/SW Va area the lowest I found was 13 inches. The highest was 16 inches. You could even pick out areas that saw 12+ inches of snow by temperature. It was 6-10 degrees colder in those areas than it was in areas that saw less snow.