Ever since it became apparent last year that a moderate to possibly strong El Nino pattern was developing in the Pacific, one of the concerns centered on the fact that the next Winter Olympics were scheduled for Vancouver this month. While El Nino impacts can be quite variable from episode to episode, one of the primary correlations affecting North America is a large area of typically above-normal temperatures for the U.S. Pacific Northwest and western Canada. That same area tends to lean toward slightly below normal precipitation as well, though that is a less robust relationship.

So far, it appears the pattern has indeed favored warmth, so that while there has been some precipitation in the Vancouver area, it has leaned heavily toward rain, even on some of the surrounding mountains where organizers are having to work very hard (storing snow under tarps, trucking in snow from about 90 miles away, and so on) to make conditions workable on the venues near the city. Just as an example,...

Some of you who were with us for the coverage of our winter storm after-effects last Sunday morning may have heard me mention the potential for some especially picturesque frost formations on Monday morning due to a combination of some water vapor in the air (from evaporation of melted snow and sublimation of snow directly to vapor on Sunday afternoon) and very cold temperatures Monday morning. At the time, we expected lows to dip into the upper single digits to mid teens. When combined with enough moisture, this can lead to some unusual and fun to look at frost patterns, including some that look like partial snow flakes, plates, columns and star-like dendrites.

There may well have been some pockets around the area with that type of frost Monday morning, although probably not as many as there could have been. As it turned out, temperatures bottomed out a little warmer than forecast, with most of us falling into the mid teens to low 20s, although we did manage to drop as low as...

The computer models spoke.  Then the Fish spoke.  And we gave you a chance to speak, too.

More than 2,000 of you took up the challenge and made your forecasts of how much snow you thought we would see with last weekend's winter storm.  That was in addition to the roughly 20,000 folks who voted in our very non-scientific poll on the front page. 

Now that the snow and sleet have stopped and the totals are in, we have a winner!  The National Weather Service recorded 5.0" of snow at the Raleigh/Durham International Airport from this winter storm.  Four people — out of the total of 2,292 entrants — guessed the exact amount, so we drew one of those four at random to win the prize of a $50 gas card and a WRAL.com T-shirt.  Congrats!

By the way, when the NWS tallies snowfall, accumulated sleet is counted as snow.  They are different things, of course, and they accumulate at different...

The winter storm that crossed our region Friday into Saturday left quite the swath of snow and ice behind, not just around here but stretching all the way back into the central plains states as it tracked along. Once drier air moved in and clouds dissipated along much of that band on Sunday, satellite images began showing nicely the areas that had a bright coating left behind, and I've collected three of those here. They are all made by compositing image bands captured by NASA's Aqua satellite, a polar orbiter capable of high resolution, true color imagery.

The first picture shows the entire U.S., and you can clearly make out the snow and ice cover that starts around the Texas panhandle and extends to the east coast in a band that is about 1-300 miles wide north to south. The second image is a closer view of the eastern U.S., allowing a little more detail to show, including the way the precipitation kind of faded to freezing rain and rain across southeastern parts of our state,...

Today is a sad day for TV weather fans in North Carolina. Legendary TV weatherman Frank Deal, who delivered nightly forecasts on WGHP in High Point for 27 years, passed away peacefully early this morning, after a battle with Alzheimer's disease.

For obvious reasons, many weather enthusiasts have a special connection with their local TV meteorologists. I think there's a connection between people who enjoy and are fascinated by the weather and those we see on TV with that same enjoyment. I was no different. I grew up on the other side of Winston-Salem, and watching Frank was a regular thing in our household. In addition to being an accomplished forecaster, he was always a showman, and he was known for telling a joke every night during the weathercast. You knew it was coming because he started it the same way every time: "Our man in…" He'd rattle off one of the towns...

The long stretch of much-below-normal temperatures we experienced from late December to mid-January was also quite a dry period for most of central NC, with the Raleigh-Durham airport, for example, only recording 5 hundredths of an inch of rain during the first 15 days of this month, that falling back on January 8th.

Any trend toward drying out was brought to a rapid close this past weekend, though, as a complex frontal system and upper level disturbance brought widespread rain, embedded heavy showers and even a few thunderstorms to the region. The result was a total of 1.48 inches of rain at the airport, a lot of rain but not enough to match our record for the date of 1.75 inches in 1977. Across our area in general, rainfall amounts ranged in the one-half to two inch range.

The attached map shows rain totals across the state, and nicely illustrates how widespread the significant rain was. The medium to dark greens that cover most of the state represent radar and gage-based...

We mostly missed out on it in the Raleigh area and points south and east, but the major snow storm that rolled across the northeastern United States on December 18-19, 2009 left significant snow behind in northwestern parts of our viewing area and even more for the mountains and foothills of our state. You can see the snow left behind on the ground in the satellite image posted here, taken on Dec 20th.

The National Weather Service Forecast Office in Raleigh has completed a very nice summary covering details of the storm's evolution and impact, how watches and warnings worked out, and how some models and supplementary data sources performed as the event unfolded. For those of you interested in more information on this storm (and want to review what a "Miller A" storm is!) I've included a link to the summary.

It's worth noting that the Raleigh office also maintains a collection of summaries and case studies, some very brief and others in great detail, covering major...

I'm a week or so late posting this, but as we're about to finally warm up a little after 17 straight days with high temperatures in the Triangle area below the seasonal norm (55 on Dec. 27 was the last time we pushed above normal, and we should do it again, finally, on Jan. 14), I thought I'd take a quick look back at a couple of statistics from the Raleigh-Durham airport for 2009, as that year begins to recede in the rear-view mirror.

While the complete, quality-controlled climate data for the year isn't yet published, I tabulated the numbers for temperature and precipitation based on monthly records, and came up with an average temperature for the year of about 61.3 degrees Fahrenheit. This is 1.7 degrees above the 30-year "normal" value of 59.6, for a warmer-than-normal year overall. It may not seem like a large difference from normal, but it's worth noting that for the current "normal" base period of 1971-2000, our coldest yearly average was 58.3 degrees...

During my undergraduate days at NC State, I had the opportunity to hear — twice — Dr. Al Riordan talk about the year he spent at McMurdo Research Station on Antarctica.  To this day, it's one of the most interesting presentations I've ever seen, much like the stories of the wild west must have been to folks here on the east coast a hundred-plus years ago.

Well, a colleague of ours is getting to live out that experience, albeit for a much shorter time than a year.  (I'm pretty sure Greg is so jealous he can hardly stand it.)

Dan Satterfield, a meteorologist with WHNT-TV in Huntsville, Alabama, is the lucky fellow getting to spend some quality time on the bottom of the world.  He's there on an expedition along with outreach scientist Ann Posegate from Earth Gauge.  Both are blogging about their experiences and what they find.  Some of the stories they've told, including of the southernmost rugby match ever played and a gorge nous sunset...

You've probably heard news reports about the improvements through the years in hurricane track forecasting, a result of better data collection, research on factors that influence the patch taken by the storms, more powerful computers and the resulting upgrades in computer models that project these tracks. One outcome of all this is that the average error of track forecasts from the National Hurricane Center have been cut in half over the past 15 years or so. Unfortunately, forecasting the intensity changes that will occur with the storms remains a greater challenge, and relatively little improvement has been made there. Still, having greater confidence where the storm will be and when is a major achievement.

Just a few years back, this led NHC to increase the time span covered by their official forecasts from three days to five days into the future. Now, they are taking the next step and increasing the lead time they will apply to their tropical watches and warnings. This will...

Well, if you're anything like me, you woke up disappointed.

Not that this was supposed to be a repeat of January 2000, or even a repeat of January 2009.  We were talking a dusting to, perhaps at best, an inch of snow.

That's not even enough snow to make a snow-mini-man, much less snow cream or any of the other snowy goodies we like to think of with a good snowfall.

Still, the disappointment remains.

What happened?

This was never going to be a big, memorable snowfall.  Greg all but said as much earlier this week, warning us not to let the "10 really good reasons" why it would snow drown out the "15 equally good reasons" why it wouldn't.  For the last couple of days, our forecast has consistently been for a very minor snowfall, with total accumulations of no more than an inch or so.  If anything, we were worried that the accumulations...

Every day, we show current temperatures and other conditions from dozens of locations across the state.  Most of those locations are airports, owing to an intricate history between meteorologists and the aviation industry that funded much of the data collection for decades.

Of course, that leads to the oft-heard complaint: "Nobody lives at the airport!"  To put that another way, do the conditions — temperatures, rain totals, etc. — at the airport fairly represent the conditions in between? 

There's a strong argument suggesting observations at airports are not as representative of conditions in the surrounding areas as we once thought, and that begs the question: where can we get more data?  A research team at the National Centers for Atmospheric Research says the answer is sitting in your garage, driveway, or parking lot.

Think about it. ...

If you like to ski, you've no doubt checked on TV or online to see how much snow your favorite resort has.  Some of you have perhaps even chosen one resort for your ski trip because they reported having more or better snow than another resort.

Ever thought those reports about piles of snow might just be piles of something else?

Researchers from Dartmouth studied the snow reports from hundreds of ski resorts and showed that, absent meteorology to the contrary, some ski resorts reported an average of 23% more snow on the weekends — snow totals that were not supported by independent observations.  In other words, some resorts were inflating their snow totals to attract business from skiers who thought they had more or better snow than other resorts.

Oops.

Another interesting angle on this: Near the end of the study, an iPhone application was released that making...

It's certainly been cold around here lately, but in some parts of the country, cold weather like what we've been enduring is a way of life for much of the winter.  The cold air has certainly been an inconvenience for us and has been, at times, even dangerous.  Taken for weeks at a time, though, it can be lethal, especially for some livestock.

That's why a number of National Weather Service offices in the northern Rockies will begin issuing advisories when the weather is forecast to be too cold for newborn calves.  Some estimates suggest upwards of 100,000 calves die of cold stress each year.  For the ranchers who depend on raising those cattle and selling them at auction, that's potentially millions of dollars lost every year.

This will be the second year for the Cold Advisory for Newborn Livestock (CANL) system, which is focused on the specific weather conditions that are potentially...