Dudeaster

So far The Experts seem to have done about as good a job predicting the snowfall accumulation from this storm as they did the election. I didn’t go into the office today because I expected when I woke up, it would be snowpocalypse. Of course, there’s still more storm coming, but it’s looking like a dud here so far.

Not that I’m going to complain. I wasn’t look forward to shoveling 2 feet of the wet, heavy stuff off my driveway this afternoon. In other news, I absolutely hate The Weather Channel’s policy of naming winter storms. I hate it enough I’ve been actively boycotting them for their sin against meteorology.

Related posts (automatically generated):

  1. The White Menace
  2. IHMSA Blues
  3. When Do You Not Own Your Property?

18 thoughts on “Dudeaster”

  1. I live in the mid-west, but was curious how bad your weather was. When I turned on the broadcast news, every network spent most of their first hour on the “Blizzard of 2017.” It even upstaged their usual Trump-bashing which was only allowed five minutes at the end of their first half-hour. But their on-scene reporters were standing in only 3-4″ of snow with normal traffic passing along behind them. Their rhetoric made me think that you had been buried in snow, but their video feeds showed barely a dusting. I thought, how naïve do these reporters think we are?!! Then, like you, I remembered their election drivel. But they did say more was coming, so I reckon you should keep the shovel handy just in case. Stay warm!
    – Arnie

  2. It’s the “Weather Channel Effect”. The providers need the click-bait and viewers to cover the increasingly dismal expenses. The best way to do that is to manufacture a crisis – slightly rough weather becomes an emergency, and dire stories about “global warming” fill in the quiet days.

    Hell, the Weather Channel even tries naming these storms. I think they call this one “Stella”.

    I got some ice building on trees even now, but we’re south of DC and near the bay. Very little global warming fell on us, but just a few miles over in NoVA one of my employees got 4-5 inches. Either way, not a bad storm.

  3. I agree it’s funny watching newscasters standing in 3″ – 4″ of snow trying to make a story where there isn’t any, but I believe this storm had higher accumulation gradients than typical. I believe Lehigh County has been hit a lot harder than Bucks County, though still something short of disaster.

    I believe a conservatively severe forecast is more desirable than an underestimation. This is reaching pretty far back in history for an example, but the hurricane of 1938 that wiped out New England was a disaster in part because it was not predicted at all. Ships offshore had reported it, but in those days “everyone knew” that hurricanes hundreds of miles east of Virginia never turned inland, and so no one mentioned it.

    Speaking of severity gradients, the March 1962 nor’easter I recall being pretty much a non-event around Bucks County, but it wiped out whole portions of the New Jersey seashore.

    Anyway, I’m not going to complain if disaster is predicted, but fails to materialize.

  4. I shouldn’t have called it a dud before I tried to shovel it. It’s sleet on snow. Heavy heavy shit that likes to break into boulder sized chunks. I’d rather have a foot and a half of snow!

    1. “I shouldn’t have called it a dud before I tried to shovel it”

      Heh! I just came in from clearing the driveway and walks, and was just sitting down to write exactly that! Looks like we both commented before accessing the real damage.

      Thinking like an engineer, I wish they’d supplement snow predictions and reports in “inches,” with snow load in pounds per square foot. (After all, they took to reporting those dopey “feels like” temperatures, didn’t they? Whatever happened to “25 deg. and windy as hell,” which everyone understood?)

      Chances are if Lehigh County got more accumulation in inches, they in fact got little or more precipitation in pounds-per-square foot than we did. I suspect as light and fluffy snow, we’d have had more than a foot.

  5. Not a dud up here in upstate NY (north of Albany). We’re actually under a blizzard warning, and it’s the heaviest snowfall I’ve seen in years. We’ve got 10 inches on the ground so far, so it’s averaged about an inch an hour, and it’s not supposed to slack off until tomorrow morning, so 2 feet is probably a good estimate and that’s what the news up here is reporting now (3 feet in some Vermont areas).

    1. “Not a dud up here in upstate NY (north of Albany).”

      I once had to spend over a week in Rochester, not because of the weather, but coincidentally there was a huge blizzard the day I arrived.

      I was astounded at how life seemed pretty much unphased by the big snowfall. Everything continued apace. The scheduled meetings happened as scheduled.

      As a stranger to the area, my main problem was with driving in deep trenches, from which I counldn’t see over the sides to see landmarks telling me where I was. It was an interesting study in how residents of certain areas adapt to conditions the rest of us regard as extreme.

    2. Here in Northeastern Vermont, we got around 2′ or so. Not great, but not all that unusual, either.

    3. Pushing 3ft here, just east of Syracuse. I think we got what others didn’t.

      And yah, it takes one heck of a storm to shut down Upstate NY, but this one did it!

  6. If you have been boycotting the Weather Channel, how do you actually know that they are still naming winter storms? Maybe they stopped last week while you were sleeping? Unless you peeked!

  9. Ignore the weather channel. Go to the NWS site which is less hysterical and much more fine grained allowing you to get the forecast for you neighborhood.

  10. Out in central PA they called off school the day before, so of course it was nothing…..

  11. I’m in north central PA, right up against the NY border. I think we have about a foot thus far. it’s hard to tell. the wind is up and due to the houses it’s getting pushed around into drifts. Sill, its about what the forecast indicated.

  12. I’m near Dover, PA (between Harrisburg & York), and we saw 12-14″. It was mostly snow with a smidgen of sleet. It was heavy too!

Comments are closed.