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I would have been 80 miles offshore that friday nite it hit. The boat was behind on work in dry dock. Many boats were lost offshore. 100mph+ on the west coast of FL. That was the strongest winds i have seen in my life. No hurricane has come close yet in my life.
Did you get any snow where you were? I know that Tallahassee, Panama City, Defuniak Springs, and Fort Walton Beach all got measurable snow, which is a rare occurrence as it is let alone to happen in March.
I was reading about this storm since you brought it up. It was a pretty interesting storm to learn about. While it's unlikely to have had any effect on the Western half of the country, a pretty big chunk of the Eastern part of the US got hit pretty hard. Numerous locations saw record snowfall totals for the month of March, and there were even tornadoes that caused considerable damage. A few hundred people lost their lives, and many more were injured or left homeless.
We got five feet in northwestern New York State. The snow started relatively light for our region late Friday night. My mother picked us up early the next morning as we'd slept over at my grandmother's house Friday night. We got home just a few hours before it got really bad. Around dinnertime, a bright series of flashes from outside made me think a transformer blew up but the power didn't go out. Then came the sonic boom. It was the first time I experienced thundersnow in my life The wind was so strong (45-60mph sustained) it made the old windows rattle constantly through the entire night. The snow finally stopped Monday morning. By this point, the drifts were as high as the telephone poles and second floor windows. There were still 3-4 foot mounds of dirty snow along the roadsides on Easter as I remember watching one of the first Florida Marlins games and wishing the snow would melt faster.
I find the general pattern of increases in the frequency and intensity of extreme (and not so extreme) weather events to be fascinating, not so much individual events.
Did you get any snow where you were? I know that Tallahassee, Panama City, Defuniak Springs, and Fort Walton Beach all got measurable snow, which is a rare occurrence as it is let alone to happen in March.
Houston passing or equaling 100F/32C 30 out of 31 days in August of 2011. Consider the fact that the mean max in Houston averages 101F, then you realize how bad that month really was.
All of which was at IAH, well north and inland of the actual city (which itself is a bit inland).
Plus, many of those 100F+ days wouldn't have happened without the increased UHI from all that sprawl around IAH.
Personally - it was 25 yrs ago: the march blizzard of 1993 with thundersnow.
Runner up was the day it hit 23 below when Knoxville was the coldest spot in the nation. I don't want to see that again but I'll take some more thundersnow.
We got five feet in northwestern New York State. The snow started relatively light for our region late Friday night. My mother picked us up early the next morning as we'd slept over at my grandmother's house Friday night. We got home just a few hours before it got really bad. Around dinnertime, a bright series of flashes from outside made me think a transformer blew up but the power didn't go out. Then came the sonic boom. It was the first time I experienced thundersnow in my life The wind was so strong (45-60mph sustained) it made the old windows rattle constantly through the entire night. The snow finally stopped Monday morning. By this point, the drifts were as high as the telephone poles and second floor windows. There were still 3-4 foot mounds of dirty snow along the roadsides on Easter as I remember watching one of the first Florida Marlins games and wishing the snow would melt faster.
Thundersnow is notorious from producing very heavy snow wherever it strikes. The most common place for it to happen is the Great Lakes region, but it isn't unheard of in the Northeastern section of the country. Five feet of snow is coming very close to the record for most snow to ever fall in a calendar day here in the US. Based on what you're saying, I very relieved that you managed to get home before the worst part of the storm struck. I would assume that getting stuck in the middle of it would've been no fun.
Personally - it was 25 yrs ago: the march blizzard of 1993 with thundersnow.
Runner up was the day it hit 23 below when Knoxville was the coldest spot in the nation. I don't want to see that again but I'll take some more thundersnow.
I've never experienced thundersnow before, but I hope to do so whenever the opportunity presents itself. At first, I thought it was impossible for snow to fall during a thunderstorm. There were several instances that I had dreams about it, but I didn't think it could happen in real life. However, when I looked it up, I was shocked, to say the least. It may not be the most common weather phenomenon out there, but thundersnow is real. The Great Lakes region is where it occurs the most. A reason for this is very likely the whole lake-effect snow thing. Cold air blows over warmer lake waters, and results in snow falling over the areas surrounding the lakes. My guess is that people in the Great Lakes region are saying that climate change is not happening because the warmer lake waters result in more frequent and intense lake-effect snows.
This was in TN and followed a very warm spell with air coming from the gulf of mexico.
But that weather cycle is very common here, warm air from the SW being followed by cold air from the NW which produces rain or snow depending on the temperature. I think I've heard thundersnow one other time, but not combined with such a memorable snowfall.
The May 1-2, 2010 floods. About 14 inches of rain fell at the Nashville NWS station, with some locations nearby getting up to 20 inches. Although the rain fell on May 1 and 2, the bulk of the damage was done from May 2-4.
The following story took place in Sumner County, TN. Saturday, May 1 was the date of my junior prom. I didn't yet have a car or a driver's license yet and I decided that I wanted to go to the prom at the last minute (Wednesday, April 28), so my dad dropped me off and picked me up. The rain was incessant all day, but I don't remember thinking "flood" until that evening. On the way down, 6 pm or so, the roads were wet; coming back, about midnight, one road on my way home was covered in a foot of water at a low spot. Luckily my dad had a Toyota Highlander SUV and drove through it. He later said that if it had been 30 minutes later it would have been impassable. The houses in that area ended up flooded out. When I got home I remember being concerned about a mansion I was scheduled to visit the following Wednesday, turns out that was the last thing I should have worried about, it was on a big hill.
The rain slackened overnight before starting up torrential again the next morning. I started seeing the news reports coming from Nashville. It was then that I realized the gravity of the situation - before I had thought it was a relatively small flood. The Opryland Hotel ended up having water in it ten feet deep. It was really weird seeing the worst of the flood hit under the clear skies on May 3 and 4.
That Monday I started hearing stories about how it had taken several hours for some of the other people who went to prom to get home, and worse, I heard that some of my fellow students' houses were damaged. I remember one family lost their house to the flood. She lived right where the flooded road that me and my dad had passed through was. On the whole, White House was lucky. Nashville seemed to bear the brunt of the damage.
When I was about 11 or so I always saw "flood insurance" commercials and wondered why we didn't have flood insurance. My parents told me that we're not in a flood prone area, we're at a high elevation. We didn't have any damage from that flood in my particular town. I guess they were right, because that was about as bad as a flood can get in our area - a 1000-year flood.
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