at 3:15 PM by Pierce Larkin

Appreciate The Past Year Of Snow

As a whole, neither of the past two winters (so far) have wildly deviated from the normal. In fact, as crazy as that two week period in February and March of 2015 was, this winter’s December might have been the wildest extreme, with many locations in central Kentucky seeing temperatures at least 10ºF above normal.

h/t NWS Lousiville
h/t NWS Lousiville

My point with that being, neither of the past two winters have been either very snowy or very cold like one might think. However, don’t let that cloud up my overall point. This state in the past 12 months has seen something it hasn’t seen in quite some time, and may not see this occur for a long time. In the past 12 months, the state has seen three snowstorms that dropped >6″ of snow across a majority of the state. Three. Let me repeat that. THREE.

20150216_Event_Snowfall_KY (1)
h/t NWS Jackson
h/t NWS Jackson
h/t NWS Jackson
h/t NWS Jackson
h/t NWS Jackson

That is absolutely insane, considering it had been years since we had seen any snow event matching the magnitude of last February’s snow event, or last March’s snow event. But another one? This is just silly. This 12 month span from February 2015 to now has completely shocked me. I didn’t believe that I would see an 8″ snow event in the state. Irrational or not, the state sits in the ideal location to have screwy precip types, warm air advection and cold rain. I had seen plenty of events shown on the models days out with heavy snowfall on them, but I hadn’t seen it play out in front of me. They would either shift northwestward, or they would have the right track, but the low level jet would be too strong, and would advect warm air into the lower portion of the atmosphere, causing freezing rain or sleet.

I was the ultimate snow denier before last year. I even wrote the “3 H’s”, which have all but faded into oblivion at this point. I still have a hard time getting excited about potential snow events, but how can I now say, “Oh, well it always misses us”? That is far from the truth anymore. With this past event, we have likely been involved in one of the more significant winter storms on record in the eastern US. Its not like we miss anymore. I feel like we are on a hot streak with the atmosphere, and it is gonna be hard to not keep our past storms in mind the next tough forecast we have.

As a future meteorologist, it is hard not to look at these events and be awed. In the 2000’s, the majority of the state’s major winter storms were ice storms. 2003, 2004, and 2009 all had bad ice events across the state, with 2004 giving western Kentucky a major snow event.

h/t NWS Louisville
h/t NWS Louisville
h/t lakeeriewx.com
h/t lakeeriewx.com

 

But the December of 2004 and March of 2008 were the only significant (>6″ of snow) to impact at least a large portion of the state. And while they were both larger storms, they pale in comparison to these three events. And those are only TWO between 1998 and 2015!!! TWO. We have have three in 12 months. And while 2010 was the only year in which we had several “bigger (>3″ of snowfall)” events in one season, it still doesn’t compare. It just doesn’t.

Now, none of this is to say that we haven’t had impactful snows since the 90’s. One inch of snow can often times be more impactful than >6″ of snow can be. It is so rare to see stretches like this. Even when we had some of the largest winter storms in state history during the 90’s, we didn’t have them back to back to back. These past 12 months, it has been like that. 1993-1994, and 1996 are likely the only timespans that are similar. Take it all in guys, weather weenie or not. These past 12 months have been special for snow events, and we’ll only realize that more into the future.