~A Look Back at October 2024 And A Bit Of This N That

November 2, 2024

October 2024, is now in the books. It will go down as a dry month and a month that saw temps overall, just above the average for October. That was created by many swings of both above and below normal days. The dry, and often clear weather dominated by high pressure that’s been all too familiar since June, allowed for a continuation of colder valley nights.

With a lengthening night time period, those valleys have more time to chill and that’s exactly what we saw. Enough so that the Northern Canaan Valley Refuge station at 3150′ averaged a monthly minimum temp of 26.3°. That’s low enough for the coldest average minimum temperature for October 2024 in the eastern U.S.

• Canaan Valley Refuge WV 26.3°

(occured by radiational cooling-calm clear conditions)

• Mt. Washington NH 28.4°

(occurs by the airmass in place accompanied often by strong winds)

• Saranac Lake NY 32.3°

(occured mostly by radiational cooling-calm clear conditions)

Before we get back to monthly temperatures, a look at the precipitation on the month:

• Bittinger 2NW Valley 1.75″
• Canaan Heights/Davis 3SE 1.87″
• Canaan Valley Coop 1.43″
• Snowshoe 2.37″

Those numbers are well below par for the month:

This has lead to a continuation of dry conditions. A look at a few different drought products. The first of which I think is superior to the drought monitor which will be shown as well.

• And the drought monitor

Also, I would encourage those interested to go back through some of the great products out there and view previous dry/wet periods in the link below.

https://www.drought.gov/states

• Our year to date precip is running very close to 2023

At October 31st.

• Bittinger 2NW Valley

-2023 43.76″ -2024 43.52″

• Canaan Heights/Davis 3SE

-2023 45.67″ -2024 47.18″

• Snowshoe

-2023 44.10″ – 2024 47.88

Snowshoe liquid precip data appears fine. Later on, I’ll explain why temp data now will have no comparison to previous years and snowfall data has suffered for years.

• Below is a current soil moisture and streamline image

• NOAA sees the dry weather continuing

Long range modeling varies run to run and will struggle. Modeling often tends to trend towards climatology and that does not always pan out.

The 0z ECMWF ensemble mean supports the overall drier than normal conditions through mid month

As does the GFS ensemble mean

Anything beyond the next 2 weeks should be took with a huge grain of salt. As we go through the transition season that ofyen features pattern changes, drastic changes in the mid range (10 to 15+ days) can suddenly occur on modeling.

With the dry weather, fallen autumn 🍂 debri and dry forest floor, grass areas and fairly dry gusty cold fronts comes the increased risk of wildfires. Be aware of that! There are burn bans currently in place in areas for this reason.

Ok back to temps for October

Milder bookends with the cold mid month that did provide for a touch of winter on the Wv Tops

Spruce Knob October 16th, 2024

• More from that event can be viewed at:

OCTOBER 16, 2024 SPRUCE KNOB EDITION

Speaking of high elevation sites. Snowshoe data which for years was observed at 4765′. A station move with no indication on Metadata has occured. Official Temperature data is now being collected at 4200′ at Silvercreek. With this move of distance and vertical feet, the station should not retain the original name and begin a completely new dataset. It has not as of yet.

For October at 4200′ base at SilverCreek

Here is the official data now from 4200′

Night time mins are MUCH colder. Again 5am reporting time leads to carry over mins as well. Daytime maxes are a bit warmer. They do not offset each other. They put in a huge discontinuity of years of data.

Let’s look at the data tallied at 4534′ CWOP station at Snowshoe. This will not be in a position to chill on radiational cooling nights and more in line with the original coop site. Daytime maxes here will be only slightly above the 4765′ site and mins will run very close

And we see maxes cooler at 4534′ and mins much milder. 35.3 to 43.4. That’s a 8° swing.

Lets look at Spruce Knob at 4820′

So you’d expect the original coop would have ran 58ish and mins around 42ish. So, you can no longer take Snowshoe temp trends with any form of accuracy. This NEEDS addressed.

Also looking compromised is snowfall. As we saw accumulation across the top mid month and lingered several days on top. Refer to the daily post here through that period.