![]() Dulles Airport off to the west has only seen 6.6 inches of snow, which is around a third of what they see in an average season. Washington's National Airport has only recorded 3.7 inches of snow this winter. Communities south of Corpus Christi, Texas, saw more than half a foot of snow, one of the biggest storms ever recorded in that part of the country. Mobile, Alabama, saw just over an inch of snow this winter. The accumulating snow even reached the Florida panhandle. Look across almost the entire southern United States and you'll see a trend of unusually high snowfall totals. Our above-average snowfall wasn't a fluke. We accomplished this feat across three storms-one in December, one in January, and the storm at the beginning of this week. That's well above our average of about seven inches each year. ![]() We've gotten lucky here this year, measuring about 18 inches of snow this winter. I live just north of Greensboro, N.C., in the small city of Reidsville. (Sorry to my friends there who find this painful to read.) One look at the seasonal snowfall map shows a glaring omission in areas that decided to participate in the snowfest we've seen south of the Mason-Dixon line this season. Nobody knows that better this year than the Washington D.C. ![]() The intricate dance between temperatures, moisture, and lift can be so finicky that a small deviation in a storm's track from what's expected could have a dramatic effect on who sees what. The fortunes of seasonal snowfall are driven by two major factors: storm tracks and storm characteristics.Įvery article written about a nor'easter that doesn't include some variation of the phrase "track is everything" is doing you a disservice. The cutoff between feast and famine is so abrupt that it can almost seem like the satellite images and precipitation maps were faked. Two neighboring towns can see dramatically different snowfall totals from the same storm. I wrote about this perceived thunderstorm bubble over at Mental Floss last year the phenomenon is so common that there's an XKCD comic strip about it. It didn't rain here in my central North Carolina county for a long time-once that streak ended, we got slammed by a parade of severe thunderstorms almost every week, a phenomenon I half-heartedly called #Rockinghaming. One of my favorite weathery complaints is that it seems like thunderstorms go out of their way to miss or hit certain areas. Some areas really do just miss out some winters while snow is on the decline in some areas, the conspicuous lack of snow in one spot compared to nearby counties and states is often a fluke in the grand scheme of things. Lots of meteorologists and snow lovers take to social media every year to complain about the "snow bubble" or "snow dome" or any of the other frustrated terms we've come up with to complain about getting ripped off in the snow department. You're not alone if you ever feel like there's a dome warding away all signs of snowy weather in your hometown.
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