That Blasted Groundhog!
With Punxsutawney Phil seeing his shadow this morning, the kids still bouncing off the walls at home after last weekend’s snow and wild rumors circulating around Charlottesville about another major winter event (never mind tonight’s 4-6 inches), I decided to put in yet another call to Jerry Stenger, who heads U.Va.’s State Climatology Office.
First of all, Jerry is becoming more popular than Larry Sabato. Even as I spoke with him, he fielded calls from two other reporters.
So what is this we hear about huge snow this weekend?
“Right now, any way you slice it, it looks like we’re in for a doozy,” he said.
Getting a little more technical, he explained that this sets up as a classic bad-news case for Charlottesville: a moisture-laden nor’easter coming up the Atlantic coast colliding with a cold front arriving from the north. As it appears now, it would start Friday at noon and end around dawn on Sunday.
The big question is, how is it going to start? It could be rain, freezing rain, sleet or snow, Stenger said, and it’s too early to tell.
The worst scenario: 1 to 2 inches of tree-snapping, power-outing ice, followed by 4-6 more inches of snow, just to make driving impossible.
The “best” scenario: 15-20 inches of fluffy snow.
Incidentally, for those of you keeping score at home, we’re up to 34.2 inches of snow already this winter. The local record is 54.7 inches, set in 1995-96. As Stenger notes, we could surpass that by the end of the week, and still have six more weeks of winter left.
Damned groundhog.
(Photo blatantly borrowed from blog.locallectual.com.)
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Louise Dudley | February 3, 2010 @ 9:28 am
Great use of this blog. Hope you update it today!