A short fall break
The blog server will be undergoing some work on Tuesday, particularly in the evening when it may be offline for a period of time. So, considering that and the quiet steadiness of our seasonable autumn weather this week (maybe a few showers Tuesday, but mostly cool days, mild to warm days and dry through the weekend), this would be a good time for a short “fall break” from weather blogging. So I’ll be back on Wednesday or maybe Thursday.
If you can log in here on Tuesday and add a comment, I’ll treat like this the popular “open threads” on some of the other Roanoke.com blogs — except by my rules (no politics and no personal disrespect being a couple of them).
October 5, 2010 - 12:03 AM
RSS feed 
Has Kevin not approved anything or are there really no comments?
OK I’ll start… What’s everyones feeling about this winter? White, or more like the last decade? I see us getting more snow then the opening decade, but far less them last year. 2 good winter storms with at least 8in and a few snow filled days of little accumulation. Or I may be way off!
What a drop in temperature between 1:30 and 2:30 today. I walked out of the small restaurant where I ate lunch about 1:30, and the temp was in the low 60s with very little wind. When I got out of the car about 2:30 at Garst Mill Park to give Blondie-Boy a walk there, temp was 54 and blowing! Anyway, I looked up the first freeze dates at Blacksburg, and found a real diversion in dates. Some of the dates were weeks before Roanoke, while many were either the same date or less than 5 days apart. In September 2000, Blacksburg almost got a freeze on the 17th … 33 degrees. But still the first freeze was October 9, 2000, exactly 4 weeks before Roanoke’s FF of November 6th. In 2001, both cities had the same FF date, 10-08-01, although Bburg got all the way down to 25 that morning. In 2002, another big gap. Bburg was Oct. 18, while ROA was Nov. 19th. But since 2003, only twice has Blacksburg had a FF date more than 3 days earlier than ROA, Oct 3, 2006 for Bburg, Oct. 31 for ROA. And last year: Burg’s was October 19th, with ROA’s again being October 31st.
I had a comment earlier, but the blog but bit me again.
I forget what it was at this point…I’m waiting for the servers to get fixed before doing a whole lot more posting, I’ve lost probably a half-dozen or more comments over the past couple of weeks.
That should say ‘bug’
There were reports of some peaks in TN getting 2-3 inches of snow overnight…that’s pretty cool. We also had to get a fire going last night, and probably will again tonight. It’s chilly enough to do that and helps make it feel like fall has finally arrived.
We also got some light rain sprinkles and showers, not unlike the NW upslope stuff we’ll have that brings snow flurries and showers out our way. Looks like the ULL might fling a few more our way before it moves far enough away.
I have the advantage of saving drafts of my posts as I’m writing them, so I don’t usually lose a whole post when the server flutters. But I have had needed 2 or 3 takes to get a post up now and then. Hopefully this will cure that.
It is confirmed: Snowshoe Mountain saw its first snowflakes of the season today. Check out the video on the home page of Snowshoe Mountain’s Web site.
http://www.snowshoemtn.com/index.htm
If anyone’s interested, Henry Margusity from Accuweather has released his predictions for the 2010 – 2011 winter.
http://www.accuweather.com/blogs/meteomadness/story/38281/henrys-winter-forecast-for-dec-1-2010-to-march-31-2011.asp
Interesting winter outlook from accuweather. I like the early snow, but not the late winter mix (AKA ICE).
Looking at the initial forecasts for the winter and just my own gut feeling, I sense some wisespread ice storms this year. FLoyd and some isolated pockets got hit a lot lately, but we haven’t had a good (bad) area-wide icing event in a while now. The last one I remember was 3-4 years ago, before we built our house. We’ve had some minor glazing here and there, but nothing that made travel impossible for large swaths of the region. I think we have that this winter though.
My early guesstimate is that we see near to maybe slightly above-average snow totals with one 6+ snow event, 2 in the 3-6 range with some mixing, and a couple smaller snows…with one bad ice storm, and another storm or two with scattered severe icing where other places see mostly rain.
This year continues to be the absolute depths of the Underworld for temperatures, in my opinion. January and February, when I want it to be warmer than normal, or at worst normal, it was cold. From May through September, when I want it to be cool, or normal, or at worst just a little warmer than normal, every single month was at least 2.5 degrees above normal, with an alltime hottest June and summer. Now that it is October, when I would like it to be warmer than normal, or at least normal, this month is starting out cool, and likely to continue. CPC 8-14 again (updated yesterday) shows our region with an above normal chance of being cooler than normal. On a zero-to-ten scale, with a 10 being a year that fits my preferences to a T, this year gets a negative 1. I give up …. what did I do to anger the temperature gods??
Tornadoes in Arizona today, around the Flgastaff area.
Is this common? That terrain is very mountainous.
Tornadoes in the state of Arizona aren’t as rare as they seem. But tornadoes in the Flagstaff area — that is extraordinary. And now I understand they’ve had at least 3 close by.