Thrag
6364
The ski resort 15 minutes up-mountain from me reports a season total of 483-588" (it’s a range because they measure in different spots and blowing snow doesn’t fall uniformly). Today’s weather brought in another 2-4", and there’s more on the way later this week.
Blizzard conditions this morning. I’ve raked the roof twice already, and the snow is up to my knees. Our plow guy came but it’s filling up again. Luckily I think it’s tapering off now to nothing, so if that’s the last of it, great.
Houngan
6366
Seems like, and I have no idea and I’m sure smarter people have already considered it, there must be some way in the next month to do some fast digging and figure out how to divert all the melt to reservoirs.
Thrag
6367
So now that it is officiallly springtime, I got another six inches of snow overnight. It just won’t stop this year.
So far since the so-called Spring arrival, we have had non-stop rain, freezing rain, sleet, snow, icy cold, and mud, sometimes all at the same time.
KevinC
6369
Working from home this morning as the snow piles on here in SLC (getting seriously amplified by a lake effect weather band parked right over me). This is the coldest and snowiest March I can recall. We’ve been a good 10-20 degrees below normal all month.
EDIT: A coworker mentioned he received 18 inches of fresh snow thus far, and it’s still coming down. Weather forecast was for only ~3 in the valley, but lake effect is a helluva thing.
CraigM
6370
Well it’s a good thing the lake is drying up, won’t have to worry about lake effect snow in the future ;)
Timex
6371
Ya, how is the water situation looking for SLC? Have the recent weather patterns been improving any of that?
KevinC
6372
Silver linings! Or maybe arsenic linings! :)
Been a phenomenal water year. We’re at such a deficit that much of this water is going to go towards filling depleted reservoirs. As of January or so, they were saying not much of the water was going to make it into the lake for that reason. That being said, we’ve received a lot more precipitation since then so maybe that situation has changed. It’s kind of hard for me to wrap my head around the scale of these reservoirs (including massive ones like Lake Powell, but that’s not part of the GSL water system) and just how much they’ve been depleted over the last several years.
Here’s the current reservoir snapshot. I should point out that a lot of the precipitation received this water year is still stored as snow in the mountains rather than the reservoirs, these should start filling up once the mountain snow begins to melt.
My worry is that we might be seeing a repeat of the big floods in 1983. It’s similar conditions, where the cold weather persisted unusually long and then when things did melt, it melted all at once and there was too much to handle. At least in that case, the water would make it to the lake after flooding everyone out. :)
In any case, all this snow is desperately needed. We’re going to have to pair it with substantial changes to how we use and allocate water around here to have any chance of restoring the lake. The good news is that work on that is finally starting, the bad news is that it seems like too little too late. But years like this thankfully give us more time, hopefully we don’t squander it.
JonRowe
6373
Just a fun 11 inches of snow here in dairyland.
My poor electric snowblower had a hard time with moving it. It was so wet and heavy, probably because it was almost 35 degrees out by the time it stopped.
Kolbex
6374
We just had a tornado come extremely close to us. The sirens went off and we went down into the basement and everything. I think I may have actually heard it!
Houngan
6375
Stay safe! It’s apparently coming this way, it’s always nothing until it’s something and hopefully not Everything.
Kolbex
6376
Seems to be all over for us now. I hope the same is true of you, soon! This was it:
If reports of its path are to be believed it must have come within like a half mile of us. I heard thunder and some pretty severe rain from the basement but nothing else.
My girlfriend texted me an alert that it was on the ground and told me to get down into the basement with the cats (she’s at work). I told her I’d grab them and go when the sirens went off.
At that moment they went off. xD
Houngan
6377
Jesus, that looks straight out of a movie, but bigger.
I’ve never seen this many PDS warnings and tornado emergency warnings before. This is probably, unfortunately, a historic outbreak.
Houngan
6379
Gotta say, I do love a good wind storm as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone. This will be the second this year, and I’m hopeful that the lack of leaves on the trees should see us through with relatively little damage.
Kolbex
6380
No way it went as close to us as they said it would. I looked around a bit and there was no damage I could see.
We had a tornado a few houses down from us the summer I was between 3rd and 4th grade. Well after dark so I only remember that the tv warnings weren’t exactly for us so we were in the living room until the front door blew open and my parents rushed everyone to the basement. Scary noises and constant lightning were all we really experienced down there. No idea how late I was up that night but we had some people at our house for awhile who were heading home from out of town but lived on the other side of the path, so it took them awhile to be able to actually get to their house. The next morning we walked around checking out all the damage. Lots of that, but no fatalities, thankfully.
Anyway, I’ve been absolutely scarred ever since and got super obsessed with weather for awhile. I still get incredibly anxious about any severe weather. Reinforced a few years ago when a derecho came through in the middle of the night and took out one of my trees. Rather than falling onto my house it fell onto the power lines and dropped those in my yard. That was also scary enough noises to wake me up and send me running to the basement.
KevinC
6382
I’m on the second day in a row of working from home due to being completely snowed in. This follows working from home on Monday of last week, also due to being snowed in.
An occasional snowstorm in March isn’t unexpected, but almost the entire month we were 10-20 degrees below normal and had snowstorms throughout. April seems to be continuing that theme. Meanwhile, throughout December we had plenty of precipitation but it was almost all rain because it was too warm, which was also bizarre.
EDIT: Looks like we’ve broken all-time snowpack records, and we’re still adding to it. We had a massive flood in 1983 (“Max”/purple on the chart below. The black line shooting to the moon is the current year) which was caused by a combination of high snowpack and late spring melt, which didn’t start happening in the mountains until mid-May. Going to have to hope that this latest storm is the end and we can gradually start warming up to seasonal temperatures so we can start melting off snow gradually. If cool weather persists for a few more weeks, things have the potential to get pretty bad.
Yesterday in Michigan we had some major thunder-boomers. I have a 3 yr old Golden Retriever who is normally fine with thunder but Mother Nature crossed the line yesterday. She let one rip that literally shook the house and rattled the windows. Daltrey freaked out and suddenly I have a 85 lbs pile of fur in my lap. To be fair it was so loud it made me jump a bit as well.
