Allegheny Mountains Weather

Canaan Cam offline

Feb 21(Thurs) min max avg

Bitt 2nw Valley 31.7 44.0 37.8

Garrett College 32.2 47.6 39.9

New Germany SP X

Can-Heights 33.8 47.4 40.6

CRN-Canaan 35.5 46.2 40.8

Cabin Mt 30.9 45.0 37.9

Cabin Mt north 32.0 46.2 39.1

Spruce Knob 29.5 42.6 36.0

Snowshoe 31.3 49.1 40.2

Can-Valley Floor 36.1 48.0 42.0

Can-Valley Floor N 35.8 48.2 42.0

7Springs 30.5 47.1 38.8

Cloudy start, after very icy conditions until the 1-3am. Some ice remained on secondary roads despite 40° temps and wind. That melted off after dawn… temps slowly fell in the morning hours before rising midday, early afternoon. Drier air mass in place. Dry enough air mass, despite low 40s, shady areas at Bittinger 2nw Valley still had ice cover on the snowpack from last night in spots.

Temp profile this afternoon

Radar

Satellite

Flow

Surface features and 500mb height anomalies and flow

Pics today

Joe Bastardi mentioned a like setup a few days ago to the system yesterday. December 27/28, 1990. In digging a little further, the overall pattern was strikingly similiar.
A big, dominant SE ridge, 590Heights off SE Florida. 564-570 heights over our area. Almost identical in both occasions. Not favorable for mid atlantic snow events. Deep trough south of Greenland, and western U.S…nearly identical . Big Ridge into Alaska , trough west of Hawaii, almost identical. Color enhancements are slightly different on each maps, with the present day being more detailed here.
That system, while earlier in the season, performed in a similiar fashion. A big SE ridge does not favor the WV mts and west of them for cold or snow or much winter period besides fleeting glances. The lower elevations on the east side of the Allegheny Front will run into better winter producing systems than 4000′ + elevations will, under a SE ridge pattern. Often ice is the most common winter precip with the setup east of the mountains and north central Garrett, and points Northeast. We have seen plenty of these over running events in this setup.
My head fight was- how heavy and how long that initial heavy snow period would last. Once it’s heavy and if the precip holds, it doesn’t want to changeover to sleet. In this case it lasted an additional, in most cases 1-2 hours or so longer than I guessed and that made a +1-+4 increase with overall totals, in most cases, Garrett, and east, and east of the Front. The WV mts and west held course pretty well. The ice, while creating ” imo ” the worst travel of the year last night(Sunday night could be argued for) wasn’t the tree snapping ice that it had potential to be.

Back to 1990 system snowfall… the very like pattern to yesterdays event – Snowfall
Location 1990 2019
Canaan Valley 4.0 3.8
Canaan Heights — 5.0
Bayard. 4.0 5.5
Rowlesburg 2.5 2.0
Oakland 6.0 5.5
Bittinger 2nw Valley — 5.4 *
Frostburg 12.5 6.2
Cumberland 13.0 7.2/ unofficial non coop or cocorahs report of 10
Hyndman 13.0 7.0 nearby
Keyser/New Creek —- 7.7
Romney 10.0 6.1
Morgantown. 1.8 1.2
Fairmont 2.0 >1
Mill Gap Va 3.0 4.0
Petersburg. 8.0 6.0
Moorefield 9.0 5.5
7Springs 9.0 7.2

The 1990 event was a little greater, but the setup, warm air advection system, boundaries, amounts, strikingly similiar.

*With my 5.4″ yesterday, noted in the blog page. 5.1″ had fell at the time of changeover. No boardsweep, but I did clear a seperate area to record sleet, which does get recorded as snow, this was done just to seperate the 2, but for overall tallies its one. I picked up .9 sleet after recording 5.1 snow. It did raise my snowfall to 5.4 as sleet overall works to beat down the depth vs add. Was actually surprised to add .3.

Pics below, the 500 of yesterday vs the 1990 event. As well as the 500 and surface features off Penn State ewall site from 1990.

Modeled snow depth this afternoon showing that classic zone that can see some decent winter in the big SE ridge patterns. Mainly these are over running ice events