GaWx

Don’t forget that even a mild winter month can and often does have a short cold period. They’re far from mutually exclusive. Just like a cold month often has a short mild period.

I’m projecting Jan of 2025 to end up with a mean temp of 44.8F (~6F BN) in Savannah. That would make it the coldest Jan since 1981 and tied with 1918 for the 8th coldest Jan back to 1874 behind only: 1893, 1940, 1958, 1970, 1977, 1978, and 1981 For non-El Nino only, 2025 would with 1918 be tied for 3rd coldest Jan behind only 1893 (La Niña) and 1981 (cold neutral)! Here are the only 6 La Niña Jans that were 46 or colder at KSAV: 1887 (46.0) 1893 (44.3) 1918 (44.8) 1976 (45.9) 1985 (45.3) 2011 (45.1) Average of these 6: 45.2 (MB) How were the subsequent Febs along with their anomalies using 53.6 as normal? 1887: 59.9 (MA) 1893: 56.8 (A) 1918: 58.9 (MA) 1976: 56.3 (A) 1985: 52.9 (N) 2011: 55.4 (slightly A) Average of these 6: 56.7 (A) -So, for these very cold (46 or colder/MB) Nina Jans, the following Febs averaged a whopping 11.5 warmer! -None were BN. -All but 1985 were 10+ warmer than the prior Jan. The Euro Weeklies are suggesting Feb of 2025 will be 10+ warmer than Jan of 2025 at KSAV thanks to a dominant solid SE ridge. Based on the above analysis, I have no reason to doubt that this will actually occur as of now. Historical data: https://www.weather.gov/wrh/Climate?wfo=chs

Today’s Euro Weeklies for 2/10-16 and 2/17-23 are a bit warmer than they were yesterday in the E US. There remains no BN in the E US for these weeks til the end. Canonical La Niña Feb. but nowhere near enough to match the cold of Jan. Thus this winter will ultimately likely be remembered most for the very cold Jan in much of the country along with the historically snowy Deep South. Major kudos to Euro Weeklies for predicting Jan quite well weeks in advance! We’ll see whether or not anything else quite notable will occur in Feb. This much warmer Feb vs Jan has been forecasted by the Euro for a number of weeks: 2/10-16: stronger warmth E US with shade 3 in some areas 2/17-23: some slight AN part of MidAtlantic south vs all NN yesterday:

I think today’s Euro Weeklies will revert back to warmer than yesterday based on today’s 0Z Euro ens at 360.

This is what got me confused. It says leaving faucets to drip is only for indoor ones! After all of these decades of hearing that outside should be dripped, now I see this? What the? Mine have been very slow dripping for 5 days:

New Euro Weeklies trended colder/quite cold Feb 3-9 W 2/3 of US while E 1/6 retains warmth due to SE ridge…will need to see whether or not this cold will eventually be able to make it to the E at least in modified form: Feb 3-9: Feb 10-16 trended much colder in E US, where it had been mild, with no AN: this has the look of those cold leftovers making it to E despite a SE ridge pattern: Yesterday’s 2/10-6: mild throughout E US!

OT but due to higher vis here: Should outside spigots be dripped or not?

Tony, Have you considered staying at a hotel or with someone you know nearby until your heat is fixed? That’s insane! Are you sleeping in a parka? Does this mean you also don’t have hot water?

Thanks, Don. As I posted in the storm thread, the supposed 1.1” of sleet/snow at KSAV (airport) is not being believed even by the Charleston NWS office (that covers Savannah)! This is an unmanned ASOS and is only checked by an FAA person at a certain time. The CHS met in charge (Brian, who recently moved to CHS from Phil) confirmed to me yesterday that KSAV had a whopping 1.33” of melted liquid equiv and near 100% of this fell with temps under 32 (mainly upper 20s). There was only minimal ZR (outages in the area were a fraction of 1%) and I saw only a little myself in Savannah. That means the 1.33” fell as mainly sleet and snow. I measured about the same melted precip and measured 2.9” of sleet and snow with most being sleet and their precip changed to snow earlier! There are still shaded grassy areas around town with 3”! So, the combo of having ~100% of 1.33” of liquid with temps below 32 , minimal ZR, and 1.1” of IP/SN and considering other SAV area obs (majority of CoCoRaHS reported 2.5-3.5” of mainly sleet) means that even KCHS per yesterday’s telecon isn’t at all believing it’s accuracy. He was very thankful and feels the same frustration. He assured me that it will be thoroughly investigated though he couldn’t at all assure me the official records will change (snowfall and the recorded 0.71” liquid equiv). He said one of the problems on the liquid equiv is that it fell 6PM-6AM (straddled two days) and the observer didn’t wasn’t there at midnight. I suggested they just report the two day total as the storm total and have the equivalent of an asterisk to explain. The 1.1” will also be hard to change due to the observer twice saying it was that. He said it will take months to investigate all the way to the NCDC. I already feel it will be a losing battle. If you have any suggestion please let me know. Aside: The 1/2018 liq equiv was also severely underreported as ~1/4” when it was really ~3/4” because the measuring device froze up! Edit: This is extra frustrating because KSAV gets storms like this on average no more often than once a generation. The last time there was one with liquid equiv of 1.33”+ was the late Jan of 1922 precursor to the Washington, DC tragic Knickerbocker snowstorm!! In SAV, it was a severe ZR. To have these data reporting issues in our age of advanced tech makes it even more frustrating. And that also gets me thinking about how reliable are 100 year old records. Edit #2: I’m now picking up my sis from airport. While waiting, l just measured an estimated 2” on the ground of a hard layer) (mainly sleet) and this is over 3 days later! @Daniel Boone

Ouch! I saw some shady grassy locations late this afternoon with still nearly 3” on ground! That’s the staying power of sleet combined with the light ZR that fell early and provided solid icy base and helped by high of only a little warmer 46 today (42 yesterday). We fell back to 32 surprisingly at ~8PM, only an hour later than last night. So, tough driving conditions will be developing soon in many areas as there were still a lot of wet roads in shady areas and even still snowcover remnants. Where roads were cleared there’s a lot of ice on edges, which was melting and keeping roads wet. I had @dsaurTony walk #3 late this afternoon. Maybe 4th one tomorrow!

Update 1/24 9:05 AM: SAV will resume flight operations at noon today. We encourage passengers to stay in touch with their airline for the most up-to-date flight information. Parking and rental car services are open. Concessions may be limited due to availability and staffing. Please use caution when driving on roadways as snow and ice continue to melt.

Not BN but I see Feb 3-9 has cooled in the NE to NN vs AN earlier though the SE is still a bit AN with a SE ridge: Feb 3-9 is also a bit cooler in the NE with only slightly AN to NN vs AN in earlier runs. But again the SE is AN (moderately) but like 1st map it’s NN along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts due to the lingering cold waters from the very cold Jan: After this, while the SE/MidAtlantic are still AN and there’s not even a hint of blue in the E US with an RNA, New England remains NN. In summary, it overall looks like a much warmer month than Jan, especially MidAtlantic south, but NE still stays near normal. Euro Weeklies have done very well this winter making calls, including the cold Jan. So, I’d take it’s warmer Feb forecast with much more than a grain.

Appreciate that Tony kept most of the ZR away! I don’t sled in it, but I love taking sleet walks. I’m a take a walk kind of guy in general and this makes the walks extra special. Today is (mainly) sleet walk #2 in still 3” of it in shady areas. I’m renaming it a Tony walk in his honor. Yesterday was a neighborhood walk, but today it was safe to drive to the park. When I walk I seek out shady spots off the side of the path where the 3” is still largely intact. I love the pleasantly crunchy feeling when walking in it. TBH, it feels like I’m walking in wet snow.

Yes! Baltimore/DC more than 200% of normal Jan snowfall MTD. DC 8” vs 3” normal, for example. Even Atlantic City and Wilmington, DE are above normal with 6” vs 4” normal. And even Phil has been near normal.

Update. They finally responded and said, “No I am sorry it is closed all fights to SAV cancelled on us today” but opens at 11PM tonight. I’m wondering if that’s accurate due to re-freezing and black ice forming tonight. Why would they reopen when temps are back down into 20s?

I meant closer to the east coast. But yeah, Chicago has had BN snow this month. Then again, the Ohio valley to MO has also been quite snowy. My point was to clarify for the readers that the sucky pattern was not only not sucky in many other areas in the E US but was even the opposite (great) in a large portion (Mid-Atlantic to Ohio Valley to lower Midwest south). Related to this, when it is a great pattern for the south it often isn’t in the north.

Obviously that depends on location bigtime to clarify for the readers! The SE US overall has obviously had this month one of the best patterns ever for wintry precip! The MidAtlantic has done well, too. Mainly only the NE has been below normal in the E US.

Sorry, I know this is somewhat OT, but do you happen to know if Delta flights from ATL are coming into SAV? I’m on a long hold with Delta waiting and waiting. I’m even doing text chat to try to get faster reply. Supposed to take only 5 minutes but it’s been 35 already. Now 45 minutes on hold in text chat. (I have family members with reservation made well before the storm to arrive late tomorrow morning from ATL.)

Usually a rare Deep South wintry event like the most recent one is from a low deep in the Gulf that crosses ENE over central or south FL into the Atlantic. Then it often goes out to sea well SE of the NE US instead of curling back and thus keeping the snow from moving far enough up the coast to reach the MidAtlantic and especially NE coast. So, by their nature, the very deep SE winter storms tend to not impact the NE and sometimes the NW end of the precip is even SE of the well inland parts of the SE like Atlanta. Feb of 1899 was a big exception!

Verification for corridor from SAV to Waycross of 12Z Tuesday model runs: -HRRR runs, which had by far the most snow, were way too high with snow and way too low with sleet because it had too cold 850s -GFS was even worse with 850s as it had them near 0Z from the start, which would have meant much more snow/less sleet than occurred; instead it had quite a bit too much snow/way too little sleet. But also it despite its cold 850s had that mysterious 0.3-0.4” of ZR, which was significantly too high. -Euro did well with low ZR but it had too much snow and not nearly enough IP. It appears to have had too little qpf. -CMC did very well with its 3.5-4” of SN/IP and 1.5-2” of IP, alone, as well as only 0.05” of ZR -NAM did similarly well with 1-2” of IP and <0.7” of SN, but was way too high with its damaging 0.55-0.8” of ZR -ICON did well with its limited snow but it’s hard to grade the ZR and IP since it doesn’t explicitly show either (on WxBell at least) -So overall, these HRRR/GFS runs did worst and CMC best for the SAV to Waycross corridor

Update: Surprisingly, I measured way up at ~1.3” of melted liquid equivalent! Whereas I measured 2.9” of sleet and snow and many in the city were similar, the KSAV official “snowfall” is only 1.1”! That looks too low. For one thing, their sleet changed to snow much earlier than mine did. Don even posted about them changing to snow. Also, it turns out that the melted liquid equivalent for the wintry precip came in significantly higher than earlier expected: ~1.33” per a CHS WSO met. It’s an ASOS and it had earlier reported only 0.71” per the hourlies. And they had only minimal ZR. That leaves sleet and snow. How can 1.33” of wintry precip liquid equivalent with little ZR produce only 1.1” of snowfall? I asked a KCHS WSO met. and he admitted the 1.1” looked highly suspect as being too low. He said it is an ASOS run by the FAA, which NWS has no control over. This is highly disappointing and cheapens the value of “official” records. How can that be the case with our current technology? Any thoughts? By the way, that same ASOS froze up in the 1/2018 storm and caused it to severely underreport liquid equivalent at only 0.23”. I measured 0.75! There was nothing they could do to correct it. @donsutherland1

When I learned about the difficulty in dealing with dry ice, I decided that wasn’t worthwhile. Also, no semi-reliable recent model had anything close to danger level of ZR for outages here. If they did, I would have gone with plan A of buying bags of ice. But I still charged up the 2 power packs just in case because why not since I had them. I have 30 days to return them. What are you referring to about pattern wanting to bomb us with ZR?

Congrats, holy cow on your amazing 9”, your snowstorm of the century! Who would have ever seen this coming this winter? The Cordele record is the 3.5” from the great Feb of 1973 snowstorm. That one gave this area 3.2”.

This was a very enjoyable and interesting winter storm of rare proportions here! I measured ~2.9” (mainly sleet…see image below) from a 12 hour long combo starting as sleet for couple of hours, ZR adding to base for a couple more hours, back to sleet (much more that lasted several hours), and then some snow during last few hours often mixed with sleet. And it is a very solid 2.9”! Temperatures during the bulk of it were in the upper 20s. That’s the most accumulation in this area since 12/1989. 1/2018 was ~2” of a combo. I estimate the sleet portion of the 2.9” was 2”, which would almost have to be the most sleet in the city from any storm in modern records (back to mid 1870s). 1/2018 had a good bit of sleet that lasted ~2 hours (including when mixed with snow), but it didn’t get over 0.5”. This was the 3rd most sleet I’ve ever seen behind only two ATL sleetstorms (2/1979, 1/1988). The ZR portion fortunately was much lower here than the ~0.45” in 1/2018. I’m guessing it was ~0.1” with no more than 0.05” of accretion. Thus, there were very few outages in SAV (only ~200). However, Glynn county (Brunswick) has a whopping ~28K outages, which is ~55%! Nearby Charlton county had a similar % out while Camden (~1/3) and McIntosh (~1/4) had fewer but still many out. So, extreme SE GA had by far the most ZR in the state, which was modeled well. I haven’t seen amounts yet. Total liquid equivalent precip was 0.71” at more inland SAV. Based on models calling for an avg of ~0.10” more in my area, I’m guessing ~0.80” for my place, which would be near the similarly impressive ~0.75” I got in 1/2018 (that one lasted ~7 hours). Had all of the precip been snow (which was not forecasted), perhaps I could have had up to 5” based on rough Kuchera type of considerations (nowhere near 10:1 with 850s borderline). Regardless, this 2.9” of a solid layer, if anything, will very likely melt more slowly than 5” of pure snow. After a low near 27, current temp has struggled to only 33. Thus melting of this rock solid accumulation has been very slow. Edit: For me this was not only the Brick storm (thanks @Brick Tamland) but also the Tony @dsaurstorm due to sleet dominating! He would have loved it! Edit #2: I brought inside 2 samples of the frozen precip that I had collected in 2 cylindrical cups to melt it and allow for an estimate of liquid equivalent. I did something similar in Jan of 2018 to estimate it for that winter storm. I plan to post about the results after this is completed. I’m roughly estimating 0.80” based on adding ~0.10” to KSAV’s 0.71”. @Awesomesauce81 @gtg947h @metallica470

I just measured ~1.5-1.75” of mainly sleet mixed in with the ZR of earlier. Totally sleeted in! Everything bright white. It’s amazing how light it looks more like dusk than the middle of the night! And now after an hour of a little snow mixing in with the sleet, the snow, which includes some big beautiful flakes, is increasing at 2:15! On another check at 2:20AM, it’s still majority pouring sleet!