A major winter storm is slamming the New England coast tonight and friday. Looking at record snowfall over the next 24-36 hrs. The video and imagery should be amazing coming out of that area.

Here’s a graphic of the estimated snowfall:

Interesting facts and information about the storm from the NWS office in Washington, D.C.:

…RECORD SNOWFALL FORECAST IN THE BALTIMORE-WASHINGTON DC REGION…

…EXTREMELY DANGEROUS WINTER WEATHER CONDITIONS OVERNIGHT…

GUSTY NORTHEAST WINDS 25 TO 35 MPH WITH VISIBILITIES FREQUENTLY
FALLING BELOW ONE-QUARTER MILE DUE TO HEAVY SNOW WILL OCCUR
OVERNIGHT…PRODUCING BLIZZARD CONDITIONS EAST OF INTERSTATE 95
BETWEEN BALTIMORE AND WASHINGTON. ELSEWHERE AROUND THE
REGION…NEAR-BLIZZARD WINTER WEATHER CONDITIONS WILL OCCUR
OVERNIGHT THROUGH SATURDAY MORNING. TRAVEL IS HIGHLY DISCOURAGED
OVERNIGHT THROUGH EARLY SATURDAY MORNING AND WILL BE VERY DANGEROUS.

LOOKING BACK AT THE BIGGEST STORM OF RECORD FOR WASHINGTON DC… THE
JANUARY 1922 KNICKERBOCKER STORM…28.0 INCHES OF SNOW WAS
PRODUCED FROM 3.02 INCHES OF LIQUID WATER. CURRENT FORECASTS FOR
THIS EVENT HAVE TOTAL LIQUID FALLING FROM THIS STORM APPROACHING 3
INCHES…WHICH ACCORDINGLY WOULD CREATE A SNOWFALL THAT WILL RIVAL
THE KNICKERBOCKER STORM TOTAL. GENERALLY ACROSS THE REGION…20 TO
30 INCHES OF SNOW WILL FALL BY SATURDAY EVENING.

BALTIMORE`S RECORD OF 26.8 INCHES FROM THE PRESIDENTS DAY FEBRUARY
2003 STORM WILL ALSO BE THREATENED.

Snowfall image taken outside my house on Christmas Day. Estimated accumulation was around 3 inches in my yard. 45 miles to the west in Nocona, Texas, 9+ inches fell.

To resolve the redundancy of my Storm Deprivation Syndrome, mother nature decided to throw one of those curve balls she likes to do in December and gave us a low CAPE, high SHEARED environment to chase in East Texas.

Here is a graphic of the event from the SPC:

The event kept trying to shape up along the Red River, but mid afternoon, some time around 1PM CST, the surface winds shifted to the southwest, and North Central Texas was out of the equation. I then shifted my efforts SE somewhere around the Mt Pleasant to Dangerfield area. When storm fired around Cherokee County (Rusk, Texas) I took a look at data again and once again shifted my efforts futher south.

We barely missed the Longview tornado, but positioned ourselves further NE of the event to intercept the storm as it traveled on it’s NE course. Intercepted the storm just west of Jefferson, Texas as it was getting dark… Visiblity was low, and the trees are tough to navigate in that area, so we kept it at a slow pace ensuring we stayed behind the storm some. I then headed toward Avenger, Tx where we still stayed behind the area of rotation, and never did see any debris. By this time it was completly dark, and due to the terrain and trees, I was ready to call the chase off and head back to Sherman, Tx.

When we got to Linden, Tx is where things got interesting. I headed north out of Linden where data was coming in and out… we knew there was some rotation there, but without data, we thought it was light, and the storm had lost it’s punch. Obviously we were wrong.

Here is radar imagery of the couplet just as we headed north out of Linden:

When we ventured N on State Highway 8, we had a pretty good inflow wind from the southeast at approx 10-15kts. Then within a couple seconds, there was a windshift from the west at about 45-50kts. We retreated back south a half mile and took video. The video itself turned out not good, but I was able to capture a couple of worthy images from it. They can be seen here:

All in all it was a good evening. We followed the HP mess on up through Texarkana, but it was dark, and there were a lot of trees, so we went on home.

Special thanks to Lanny Dean for his exceptional Nowcasting when I was going through my data holes!

Just playing around with some photgraphs today

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