RDM

Could not agree more. Well said. While I'm certainly not a major contributor, I am an "old timer" from when this forum started and Eastern before. Some of the "muck" gets too thick sometimes. Love a good joke and trivia as much as anyone, but some of it gets carried away.

Speaking of piling it up and/or on, whatever happened to Midlothian Snow Maker down in Richmond? He used to post pics of the snow pile in his back yard he'd make with his home-made snow making setup. Then see how late into summer it would last. Think his record was mid July or something like that. Haven't seen or heard of him for a long time...

Haha - you got it.... OH-IO I know where Etna is. Driven by it countless times going to and from NOVA and Home - 4 times last year alone. Know Springfield and the hospital in Springfield very well too. Step mom had quadruple bypass and both hips replaced there, sister-in-law worked there as ER PA and my father just passed away there in Sept (it was his time). My dad was in the first class of paramedics in the state back in the 70's. Responded to the tornado that wiped out Xenia in 74 during one of the greatest tornado outbreaks in history. Interesting to note the Shawnee Indians called the area around Xenia "The Land of the Devil Winds" for its preponderance of tornado activity.

Great to hear there's another Buckeye in our midst. Zugzwang and I were exchanging memories about the great Blizzard of 78 a couple days ago. That was a memorable event that stands out in the crowd of BECS for sure. The wind, cold and flash freeze were especially impressive... Know Cincinnati well. Ran districts x-country there at Weatherwax Golf Course 2 of my 3 years in HS. Where did you live in "Central Ohio"? I'm from New Carlisle - about 11 miles north of Dayton. Our bank was the first one John Dillinger robbed to start his reign of mayhem. O H ..... (a test)

Hey.... Zugzwang and I are from Ohio - we grew up in the cold of the 60's and 70's and know that feeling. When the snot hanging from your runny nose freezes instantly on the edge of the balaclava and even the wax in your ears freezes up despite being wrapped in the balaclava. You don't dare take off your mittens to wipe your nose cause your fingers will instantly freeze up. And the heck with gloves, they are useless. Besides, every other kid has a frozen snot hole too so you don't feel so bad. When your eyelashes are nothing more than the foundation for growing frost and your eyes dry out so much you feel like the inside of your eyelids are lined with sandpaper. And the squirrel was not dead, he was just tired from his Jebwalk... And yes, that was what it was like delivering the sunday morning paper with a sled when it was -30F and nice breeze blowing. I was a bean pole then and have a lot more insulation now. So bring it on...

Hey Jeb, Wouldn't be surprised if it's the same one. If I remember correctly, Heathkit sold two different weather stations back then, and they weren't cheap. Mine had 4 dials. One for wind speed and direction, one for barometer, one for temp and.... hummm forget what the other one was - rh?. I still have mine too, someplace. Had a ribbon cable that ran to an oblong black box that provided some of telemetry for the data. Thought it was pretty cool at the time. Was inspired by my dad who made our first color tv from a Heathkit TV kit - circa 1968 (he passed away this past Sept..) Watched Neil and Buzz land on the moon on it when I was 8. Had a mechanical remote control with 4 buttons that clicked small tuning forks that sent an audible "ting" to the receiver in the TV to control on/off, channel up/down, volume up/down and color. Dad had to buy a cabinet for it when he was done and of course he bought a Curtis Mathis, which was the best money could buy at the time. Was state of the art at the time. Never forget how proud he was when it worked. We used it until well into the 80's after I left home to move to DC.

Hey Zug, Thanks for chiming in. Believe we both commented on 78 a couple of years ago - maybe during the post 2016 banter about great storms and what was the greatest... Sounds like our memories are much the same of 78, it was a monster. I was 16 att, old enough to remember it vividly, but not old enough to understand much about the mechanics. It was one of several events that fostered my interest in meteorology. A year or two before I'd built my first weather station from HeathKit. Remember watching the wind speed indicator on the indoor display going nuts until it gave up. The anemometer stopped working for a while, but the temperature kept reporting. We didn't get above freezing again for several weeks after that, which just prolonged the impact. Appreciate the info on the books and other data. Will definitely check it out. Will be interesting to recollect the details of what 78 was all about. Cheers.

Last time I remember such a quick temp crash like that was the Blizzard of 78 growing up in Ohio, on 25 Jan, 78. We lived just North of Dayton where it gets really flat - not much to stop the wind. Was at our town's little airport with my dad the evening before it hit working on his Beechcraft and the barometer was dropping so fast there were times we could adjust the altimeter in the plane every 2 minutes (mechanical altimeters back them worked on air pressure). My dad said something special was coming even though temps were warm with driving rain. Remember him being in awe at the pressure drop which eventually bottomed out at 28.23, one of the lowest ever recorded in the US. The normal threshold for cyclogenesis is 24mb drop in 24 hours - the blizzard of 78 had a drop of 70mb in 24 hours. You could feel your ears popping and the pressure drop actually induced labor in a number of pregnant women - my dad was a paramedic and delivered at least one baby in the back of our town's 4x4 rescue squad. The winds came in overnight and temps went from mid/upper-40's and driving rain to lower teens and sn++ in a fraction of an hour with winds that eventually reached 70+mph. Woke up at 6am wondering why it was so cold in the house and wondering that "noise" was outside - it was the wind howling like I'd never heard before. The flash freeze of all the standing water made it all the more difficult to clear the snow, which drifted so bad it shut-down the GL and Ohio Valley for days. I was a sophomore in HS and believe we missed a week and a half of school. Power outages were wide-spread with many stranded for days before they could be rescued, often by snowmobile - there's some pics on Wikipedia of the Ohio Turnpike. Governor of Ohio activated the Nat Guard to deliver supplies by helo to stranded farmers with livestock in danger of freezing and starving. Many did loose a LOT of lifestock anyway and the financial impact was terrible. We only received about 12" in Dayton, with more as you went North. But the drifts were incredible and 20+ feet in places. Many of the roads, to include interstates, were closed until the snowblowers from major airports could get to them. We had some local roads closed for over a week in our area. It started getting really serious when the one grocery store in our town of 6000 was nearly out of anything edible. The shelves were bare by the time they could get trucks in to restock the shelves. People start to do desperate things when they get hungry. Will never forget it....

A potentially feigned attempt to draw another analogy to this setup.... Comparing this to the world of fluid dynamics in rivers, where eddy currents form on the edge of whirlpools that's are then sucked downstream by the main flow of the river. In this case, the ULL at the bottom of the trough generates the lead wave as a byproduct of the ULL's rotation. The lead wave is driven up the trough by the UL jet, while the main ULL digs in before moving on itself. Does that make sense?

Fantastic Bob - no doubt you are doing a lot of things the right way beyond being part of the foundation here. That's great. Can only imagine how proud your son is going to be too. Real life learning opportunities like this are too infrequent these days...

Bob, no doubt you were inoculated against having any chance of becoming jipolar a long time ago. Most of us received that immunity at a young age... Sitting at 6.5" here about a mile NW of Vienna. Picking up again....

6-1/4" just NW of Vienna on Lawyers Road. Looks to be some building down around Raleigh. Hope good stuff mentioned by the NWS for this afternoon makes far enough N&W to give us all some more. Wes should be in a prime location for that.

Great second pic of your son. The awe he must feel with what today has in store for him.... I'm nearly 60 years old and still feel the same. Only thing that changes is the way we have fun. Can't wait to get out in my Kubota and do the neighborhood. Typically plow our 450' driveway, 4 more adjacent to us that are longer, about 20 other driveways, a 1/4 mile of street and a mile or so of sidewalk along Lawyers road to Vienna. Hope your little man has a blast today!

Yup - agree. It's disappointing to see him posting again. Thought the beat down delivered yesterday from multiple fronts would have sunk in... Have never used the ignore option, but there's a first time for everything.

If the first BECS stays a BECS along with the second one on the 23rd, would the lull between the two BECS be "The Parting of the BECS" - all we need is someone to play Charlton Heston with a staff...