Wow. Last week, we experienced the craziest snowstorm I've ever seen. Granted, I was alive during the Blizzard of '79, but since I was only 5, I only have a few memories of that event, with the grandest being a vague memory of being stuck in the valley of a drift next to the house and my sister laughing at me. Incidentally, my husband says he remembers school being cancelled for 2 weeks after that blizzard. Now the Blizzard of 2011 did not dump the most snow I've seen in one storm (even though one computer forecast predicted 32" 20 miles south of here). The prize of biggest dump goes to the New Year's storm in '99--23" here, if I remember right (slightly higher than the official total downtown).
What made this blizzard crazy was the insane wind gusts (up to 67 mph downtown--that's tropical storm strength!) and thundersnow. That's right--thunder and lightning during a snowstorm. I didn't think it was really possible. However, I do remember the ONE and ONLY time ever in my school career that school was cancelled: I woke up late to a big snowfall and my sister was already outside shoveling, saying that school was cancelled because--allegedly--there was thunder during the snowstorm. But I never personally experienced it until this storm. At the peak of the storm, supposedly in the thundersnow spots, the snow was falling up to 4" per hour. But we were watching, and I've got to tell you, the wind was so crazy blowing in every direction, I don't know how anyone could possibly measure that. Officially, we ended up with 18 inches in our city. But as you will see below, the drifts were nothing to sneeze at. One city near the lake topped out at 24". Despite this lovely winter wonderland dump, I have to say I still have snow envy of the northeast this year.
For those of you who didn't experience first hand, I've included some pictures and video.
Here's the calm before the storm, though the little blur you see is actually the beginning of the winds picking up and blowing existing snow around.
I filmed video from the storm using my new camera. The footage looks great on my computer, but unfortunately for anyone else who might have actually been interested in seeing it, Blogger won't convert it. (I'm bummed because that was one of the planned highlights in this post.) The footage showed some gusts at full force at night. Visibility was reported as less than a quarter mile. I can vouch for that--we couldn't see past 4 houses away. People said it was like being pelted with lots of tiny ice daggers. I wouldn't know--I wasn't stupid enough to venture out. Kevin works less than 10 minutes away, and he said it was just miserable trying to get home--and that was before the peak of the storm hit! My apologies for the technical difficulties.
http://www.weather.com/outlook/videos/cantore-surprised-by-thunder-snow-19541?from=video_email
This is what it looked like as the storm was winding down:
Let the fun begin!
