SNOW!!!!

So we finally got a for-real snow event yesterday. 

OR DID WE?

Six to eight inches of snow were expected. The district decided to close the schools as of Tuesday night. At ten in the morning Wednesday, not a flake had fallen. At eleven, birds were chirping. At one p.m. my Windows system software said "Snowing now," but my actual windows told a different story. It was starting to look like a non-event. Not that our local bloated school administration cared. They hadn't had a snow day off yet this winter, and by God they were going to get one. 

We northerners like to make fun of how southerners panic when a little bitty snow squall shows up, but aren't we a lot wimpier than we used to be? I know it's our inner Yorkshiremen that make us look back and say how we trekked through five feet of snow during a storm that made the Children's Blizzard of 1888 look like a gentle dusting -- but when I was a kid I'm pretty sure the schools didn't close before the snow even started. 

There may be reasons for this. More children live in single-parent households now, and in houses where both parents work, and if there's no adult home to fetch the kid because the weather got bad fast, what can the school do? Better to leave them home in the first place. 

Also, at least in theory, weather forecasting is better now than it was when we were tots, what with the News 10 Dopplercast 5000 or whatever your local station advertises. So sure, it may be sunny and warm now, but you wait -- Dopplercast 5000 says blizzard by lunchtime, and blizzard it shall be. 

Well, at last, at 2:30: 

An hour or so later it had turned to rain. Some of the neighbors' kids got some sledding in:

And this morning:

It rained all night and the temperature got up over forty. In other words, not only was there barely any snow in this snow event, but the weather wiped out the snow we already had.

I can live with it. My back didn't have to brave the shovel, I didn't have to pay Piers Plowman who does the driveway, and the children got their vacation day. But I can't remember the last time a forecast was this far off. 

There's a local guy who does weather forecasting on Facebook, and I don't know what his story is, but he's good. He uses data from weather services all over the hemisphere, and knows how to do the math. Even he got rooked on this one. At three in the afternoon he wrote: 

This one I did not see coming. We are experiencing warm air advection which is warm air approaching and over riding the cold dense air in place. Typically this produces moisture in the midlevel atmosphere and would produce precipitation with upward forcing motion. In our case snowfall.

However, at this point it has plateaued and has created a dry slot bubble in the midlevel of the atmosphere as wintry precipitation is in the process of transforming to rainfall. I am not sure how long before the dry slot bubble fills back in with precipitation.

The end result is we may experience this dry slot in the weather for a couple of hours. Precipitation likely returns as a mix or rainfall.... Weather can be fickle.

You can say that again, brother!