The Big Nothing Storm of 2010

[ishoot308]

I woke up this morning at my home in Chester expecting to see well over a foot of snow. After all, our "Storm Central" forecasters at WMUR actually raised their snowfall amounts for the greater Manchester area at 11:00 P.M. last night from 12" - 18" to 14" - 20". What a surprise to see only around 4"-5" on my commute to Manchester and maybe 5"-6" in Manchester. Barely plowable amounts!! Roads were as nice as could be expected!!

I hope you all in other areas of the state are getting more snow because it's a big dud here in the Manchester area!!

Way to go once again WMUR!!!

Dan

[Lakegeezer]

Lots of wind and little snow in Moultonborough, till the early morning hours. Then the snow started piling up. About 5" by 7AM and now snowing hard with a tenth of a mile visibility. The wind overnight broke the 4-5" ice away from the shore so there is a ribbon water to refreeze - while yesterday, great ice skating.

[wifi]

There have been and still are power failures in parts of Moultonboro, I'm been without for the last 4 hours and its still down.

[Slickcraft]

It looks like the final accumulation up here on Turkey Hill in West Alton will be about 10" when it is over. The fine snow is moderately dense but still no problem to plow.

[Formula]

We still have power on the island in Moultonborough. It "blinked" a few times around 4:15am but no loss.
Right now i would say we have about 10" on the ground
I will try to take a few pictures and post them soon

[Lakesrider]

Power went out around 3:30 and came back on around 7am in Suissevale. Something happened right near the Club house.
RT109 was blocked by a fire truck at the 109-109A intersection. Roads were plowed but not great to drive on. I was out shoveling around 4am and the wind was pretty intense. remember we were being shadowed by Mt Roberts while the wind was coming from the Ossippee side of the hill so we didn't get much snow at first. i was watching on radar and you could see the no snow right on this side of Roberts. Then the wind started changing as the storm pulled away and it started snowing pretty good at about 5am or so. Still snowing pretty good in Wolfeboro. Drifting too, near the golf course. Looks to be dwindling a bit on radar now. Off to shovel and use the snow blower...Yippeee!

[SIKSUKR]

I snowblew(sp) 8 inches in Bedford and just got in from snowblowing in Manchester and I would measure at about 8-9.It's still currently snowing heavily and we will probably end up in their projected window of 12-18.Jackpot so far is my beloved Cannon Mt with 19-21 as of 6:30 this morning and snowing heavily!!!!!!

[tis]

Family members have been stuck in Baltimore since Sunday and are not sure if they will be able to get home today.

[Neko]

How much snow did Wolfeboro get?

[tis]

They say 9". It may even be less. It is a little hard to tell with the blowing.

[Jonas Pilot]

Another 2 inches fell after I posted at 9:00 am. I had a great day shoveling a lot of nothing from my driveway and deck. Better stick with your day job Dan.

Cool site.

http://www.weatherstreet.com/local_f...snow-cover.htm

[GM doc]

Originally Posted by ishoot308

I woke up this morning at my home in Chester expecting to see well over a foot of snow. After all, our "Storm Central" forecasters at WMUR actually raised their snowfall amounts for the greater Manchester area at 11:00 P.M. last night from 12" - 18" to 14" - 20". What a surprise to see only around 4"-5" on my commute to Manchester and maybe 5"-6" in Manchester. Barely plowable amounts!! Roads were as nice as could be expected!!

I hope you all in other areas of the state are getting more snow because it's a big dud here in the Manchester area!!

Way to go once again WMUR!!!

Dan

Well Dan, Come on over to my house and I will GLADLY fill your cars trunk and back seat for you to haul back home. Make as many trips as you would like, Hell, I may even PAY you to let me fill your car up.

[ishoot308]

Originally Posted by Jonas Pilot

Another 2 inches fell after I posted at 9:00 am. I had a great day shoveling a lot of nothing from my driveway and deck. Better stick with your day job Dan.

Cool site.

http://www.weatherstreet.com/local_f...snow-cover.htm

Sorry but when WMUR says DURING the storm to expect 14-20 inches in Manchester and only 6 - 7 inches falls...That's a lot of nothing to me!

Maybe where you are more fell?? Here in the greater Manchester area it was just another over hyped storm to boost ratings.

Dan

[jeffatsquam]

Originally Posted by Lakegeezer

Lots of wind and little snow in Moultonborough, till the early morning hours. Then the snow started piling up. About 5" by 7AM and now snowing hard with a tenth of a mile visibility. The wind overnight broke the 4-5" ice away from the shore so there is a ribbon water to refreeze - while yesterday, great ice skating.

lg
Am I reading into your post that your area of the lake is not safe for riding?
You always seem to have a good perspective on local ice conditions.
Thank you.

[Soapmistress]

I thought it was an OK snow storm, but was sure disappointed that we didn't get our blizzard Only been in one true blizzard, and it was an awesome sight to see. Of course snow storms are only fun if you're prepared

Rick is gonna teach me how to plow, so y'all keep an eye out

[Lakegeezer]

Originally Posted by jeffatsquam

lg
Am I reading into your post that your area of the lake is not safe for riding?
You always seem to have a good perspective on local ice conditions.
Thank you.

Monday was not a good day for being on the ice. Today is a different story. The soft and open spots are frozen again, having been exposed to a 10 degree night. The surface water seeped back into the cracks. However, the wind blew much of the foot of snow we received off the lake. There are large portions of ice showing. Somewhere, south of here, there must be some pretty big drifts. This morning, the sky is clear, but there are still big clouds of snow blowing by. Nobody has snowmobiled by here yet, but they'd probably get away with it.

10:30 update: when testing the ice, my ice poker found open water right by shore. The areas that had pulled away from the shore during the wind drifted over but did not freeze. It just looked that way. Had I stepped first, I would have had wet knees. As always - use caution!

[chipj29]

This snow was very difficult to measure, due to the heavy wind and blowing snow. One part of the yard has 3", while another has 2'. I estimate that I ended up with about 10".

One thing I noticed about this storm is the very fine flakes, not big puffy flakes. My guess is that the wind was blowing the flakes around as they fell from the clouds, and when the flakes smashed into each other, they got beat up. Had we got the nice big fluffy flakes, no doubt we would have gotten well over a foot.

[gtxrider]

If you want snow come to Joizee. 2'+ in some areas cars were stranded on the Turnpyke and Parkway for hours. It's a good thing I like to use the snow blower.

People don't know how to drive.

Babes on Sleds, move the dance further north!

[AC2717]

Well just outside of Boston I received over 2 feet of snow, not to mention some snow drifts up to 7 feet because of the 35 plus mph ouf wind. It was crazy was up for almost 30 hours straight. FUn time, now to send out those bills

[Chris Exley]

Originally Posted by ishoot308

Sorry but when WMUR says DURING the storm to expect 14-20 inches in Manchester and only 6 - 7 inches falls...That's a lot of nothing to me!

Maybe where you are more fell?? Here in the greater Manchester area it was just another over hyped storm to boost ratings.

Dan

This was such an incredibly hard storm to forecast. It is very difficult to determine where the mesoscale banding will setup. Those under the bands get a lot of snow, usually those to the west of the bands get less. As of Thursday last week this was supposed to only snow on the fishes.

I would much rather the media outlets prepare people for the worst and be wrong. If it had happened (14 - 20), and they had only been saying 3 - 6, it could have put lives in danger.

Just because you didn't get the amount you wanted, doesn't mean the storm was a joke.

I hope you get more in the next storm.

[ghfromaltonbay]

If someone would like to drive down to NJ, we have 25.5" here in Clifton. I'll gladly donate some to anyone looking to beef up their snowmobile trails. Here there's no place to go with all this white stuff.

[SIKSUKR]

Being a skiing snow lover I get frustrated with discrepencies in real snowfall totals also.Really,how could you possibly forecast 18 inches that fell 40 miles away in Boston and 30 inches in Franconia while in between many towns recieved only 6- 10 inches.Pretty much impossible to forecast these differences.

[Winnisquamguy]

Over on Winnisqaum we got right around a foot, and I don't know of any power outages.

[FLAG!]

Are they grooming in wolfeboro yet? Any trails open?

[CanisLupusArctos]

Originally Posted by SIKSUKR

Being a skiing snow lover I get frustrated with discrepencies in real snowfall totals also.Really,how could you possibly forecast 18 inches that fell 40 miles away in Boston and 30 inches in Franconia while in between many towns recieved only 6- 10 inches.Pretty much impossible to forecast these differences.

Thank you. To this statement I would add that the same kind of effect is even more common in summer with rain, but no one thinks about it much because rain has less impact on our daily activities than snow does. Any major weather system -- winter or summer -- is always going to have embedded pockets of high energy. In summertime this leads to reports that some towns got 4-5 inches of rain while the rest of the area got an average of 2 inches. But to most people, those numbers are just a point of interest, as in, "Oooh wow, that town got 5 inches of rain. Oh well, on with my day!"

If we forecast a chance of showers and thunderstorms for any given day, you know from experience that not everywhere is going to get one. Some places stay dry while the next town over gets a raging thunderstorm. If you travel right after it passes, you can tell where it hit because you suddenly go from dry road to wet road.

But rain doesn't leave us with lasting memories like snow does. That's why, when winter comes, it's so easy to forget that weather is highly localized. You get the same effects in winter as in summer, except those extra-energetic pockets of the storm end up dropping a huge amount of snow, instead of just being an area of heavier rain.

The maps generated by the computer models might show an intense storm right off the coast. We know that an intense storm is going to end up looking like a comma on the radar, and that whoever lives in the space between the comma head and comma tail will get very little action from it. That area is what we call "the dry slot." There's no predicting where it will end up.

In summertime, it's easier for us to look like we got it right, because if we say it's going to be a rainy day, and the ground becomes wet in all places, no one really notices whether they got a half-inch of rain or a tenth of an inch. Wet is wet. It all looks the same until there's enough to cause a flood.

In winter, the difference between 0.5" liquid and 0.1" liquid becomes noticeable to laypersons because, on average, a half-inch of rain becomes 5 inches of snow, and a tenth of an inch of rain is only an inch of snow. One requires plowing and shoveling, and the other doesn't. Now let's say there's cold air aloft, and the area of more intense snow is able to pull a downdraft of that colder air. That changes the liquid-to-snowfall ratio so that the half-inch of liquid becomes 7 inches of snow instead of 5, in just that location. That extra 2 inches of snow is noticeable to most people. But the underlying meteorology remains: The difference between the two locations is just 0.4" of liquid, which in summer would go unnoticed. The ground would be equally wet in both places, and everyone would say we were correct in predicting rain.

The snowfall forecast maps in winter are misleading. You get the map with a design that looks like a bullseye or an egg over-easy. 3-6 inches for one zone, 6-10 inches for the bullseye or "yolk." After the storm, the National Weather Service makes accurate maps of how much snow actually fell. Those designs have no simplicity to them at all. It's like looking at splattered modern art. The snowfall forecast maps are a generalization that usually ends up being correct -- in general -- but they can't foretell any details.

The resolution on the computer models just isn't that good yet. Great resolution is available in the addictive online games you've probably heard about. A digital 3D model of the atmosphere is just a little bit harder to create.

[Merrymeeting]

The other thing that I expect is too easy for most to forget. If you look on the radar, these large storms are usually hundreds of miles wide. The forecasts start days ahead of time when the storms are still a thousand or more miles away.

Manchester is approximately 50 miles from Boston. With 40-60 mile an hour winds, I expect it is very difficult to predict exactly where those lines will be between Boston and Manchester. Yet that is what the public expects and complains about if you get it wrong.