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The most direct way to find your question is to search for the name you used when you submitted it (first name, last name or both). If you did not include a name, then you can search using keywords from your question. Of course, since many weather-related terms are common to a lot of the questions we receive, this may turn up a number of others in addition to your own.

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Answer: Because that temperature is 16 degrees above the freezing point of water, you would not freeze. However, 48-degree water is still quite cold relative to a human's body temperature and, assuming you were not wearing special protective clothing and remained in the water, you would rapidly lose heat to the water and either perish from exhaustion and drowning within about 45 minutes to an hour, or from hypothermia in 1-3 hours. For a brief overview of what happens upon immersion in cold water, see www.ussartf.org/cold_water_survival.htm.
Feb. 15, 2013 | Tags: cold, lakes and rivers, weather & health

Answer: There was a major snowstorm that struck much of North Carolina on March 1-2, 1927 as low pressure lifted out of the Gulf of Mexico and northward along the southeastern coast of the U.S. - this storm was reported to have dropped 26 inches of snow in Goldsboro, not to mention just shy of 18 inches for Raleigh, 24 inches in Fayetteville and 31 inches in Nashville.
Feb. 14, 2013 | Tags: past weather, snow

Answer: Most people experience frequent changes in barometric pressure as high and low pressure centers and front pass though, or larger ones when flying, scuba diving or traveling in mountainous areas, and do not experience vertigo. However, there have been documented cases of some more sensitive individuals experiencing vertigo with strong pressure changes (divers and pilots, for example), and it seems reasonable to think those with diseases or syndromes involving the inner ear could have vertigo attacks that are triggered by the smaller variations associated with weather systems. For any particular person, though, it would be best to consult a doctor about whether there could be a connection between vertigo and air pressure.
Feb. 13, 2013 | Tags: weather & health

Answer: The type of precipitation that falls depends not only on how cold we are at the surface, or even how cold we may have been for a few days leading into the event, but on how the temperature evolves at both the surface and higher altitudes. On the Friday you're referring to, we started the day with temperatures throughout the atmospheric column above our heads that were plenty cold for snow, but there was little moisture available for precipitation. As the day wore on, west to southwest winds around 4-7,000 feet above the ground pushed warmer air into the region at those levels, reaching near or just above freezing around the time precipitation began. At that time, we saw a mix of snow and some sleet, but as temperatures continued to quickly warm aloft, by early afternoon many of us had a substantial layer above that was in the range of 36-40 degrees, even though the air in the lowest 2-3,000 feet remained in the upper 20s. Snow that would otherwise have made it to the ground melted passing through that warm layer, becoming raindrops, and then cooled to freezing or below again as it fell through the colder air below. In places where that cold air was deep enough, the droplets froze before reaching the ground and we accumulated sleet pellets on the ground. In places where the lowest layer of cold air was a little shallower, the droplets remained liquid until they struck the surface, spread into a thin clear layer, and then froze into a glaze of ice, in the process called freezing rain. This continued until drier air arrived and brought an end to the precipitation.
Feb. 12, 2013 | Tags: past weather, snow, winter weather

Answer: The report for South Hill comes from the AWOS III (Automated Weather Observing System - III) at the Mecklenburg-Brunswick Regional Airport. The temperature-humidity sensor there has experienced intermittent outages since about mid-January. While we use the information in our broadcasts, responsibility for maintenance and repair at the facility rests with the FAA. Typically, when there are issues with observations from these sensors, the nearest National Weather Service office will make appropriate notifications to have the FAA schedule repairs.
Feb. 11, 2013 | Tags: instruments

Answer: Elizabeth was happy to respond to your question - here is what she wrote... "I get that question fairly often since some folks in our viewing area a familiar with the Gardner family in Wilson/Rocky Mount. My Gardner relatives are from Shelby in Cleveland County which is west of Charlotte. My grandfather's cousin was the Governor of North Carolina in the late 20s/early 30s. His name was O. Max Gardner. His family also founded Gardner-Webb University. I'm not sure when the Gardners came to North Carolina. My mother's family has done an extensive history. She is part of the Conrad family which came to Davidson County in the 1700s from Germany."
Feb. 10, 2013 | Tags: wral.com

Answer: We also got this question about that same morning from David DuMond - "Needles on pine trees showed some icing early Sunday AM after daylight in western Harnett County. Fog was heavy during the night. Was this soft rime, an example of supercooling in fog?"

On the night leading into that morning, there were no radar echoes indicating typical precipitation, and we instead had thick fog and low clouds. It appears based on reports from around the area and some photos that we received, that parts of the area experienced some freezing fog such as David reported, in which tiny supecooled liquid fog droplets freeze on contact with surfaces that are below 32 degrees, instantly becoming ice, but not of the crystalline variety. As these frozen drops accumulate, rime ice can build up on surfaces forming a more or less opaque white coating.

There were some other areas where the combination of temperature, humidity and avaialable ice nuclei were such that instead of freezing fog, "ice fog" formed instead, in which at least some fraction of the fog particles was made up of ice crystals, some of which settled out to give the appearance of light snow falling, and in some places collected on surfaces enough to appear as a light snowfall by morning.

There were yet other locations where skies were clear for part of the night, and in addition to any freezing fog or ice fog, we had a thick hoar frost occur, in which ice crystals build up directly on surface objects by a process of water vapor being deposited directly from gaseous to solid form. It was quite an interesting night and morning for Jack Frost and associates! You can read a little more on this and see a couple of the photos we received in the blog post at www.wral.com/what-whitened-wake-forest-/12032313/.
Feb. 9, 2013 | Tags: dew/frost, visibility/fog/dust, winter weather

Answer: Since snow can be so varied across a short geographical area, it can be a little difficult to track down an answer like this with absolute certainty, and we also don't know for sure about what part of the state you're asking about. Nonetheless, scanning information for the RDU airport and also a statewide database of winter storm events, we were unable to find a stretch of three Wednesdays with snow for the Raleigh area in March, going back as far as 1947. Measurable snow fell there on three separate days in 1947, 1960, 1962 and 1978, but 1960 was the only one of those that involved consecutive Wednesdays.

In 1960, things got off to an interesting start, with 6.5 inches at RDU on the first Wednesday of the month and 6.9 inches reported on the second Wednesday. On March 16, the third Wednesday, the low temperature was 30 and the high 36, with .78" of precipitation reported. However, none of it was snow. There was a very brief period of sleet before dawn and then a couple of hours of freezing rain around sunrise, followed by cold rain thereafter. Given the sleet report and the temperatures, it seems possible that at least some places in the general region may have gotten some snow that day, although a check of some other sites like Chapel Hill, Durham, Rocky Mount and Oxford also turned up reports of precipitation but not snow. Moving ahead, there were two more Wednesdays in that March, and on the fourth Wednesday clear skies were reported all day long, while on the fifth Wednesday over an inch of rain fell, with temperatures in the 60s most of the day. We also checked to verify snow hadn't occurred at any of those locations on the last Wednesday of February in 1960.
Feb. 8, 2013 | Tags: past weather, snow, winter weather

Answer: There can indeed be a fine line in regards to the temperature structure of the atmosphere, especially how the temperature varies with increasing height above the ground, as to the type of precipitation that reaches the ground, just a few degrees difference warmer or colder at any of many levels from the surface up through about 5-10,000 feet above the ground can produce snow, cold rain, sleet or freezing rain, and sometimes a mixture of more than one type at the same time. Sleet is reasonably well described as frozen rain drops, but you might be interested to note that in the majority of cases, the sleet pellets actually started out as snow crystals or flakes (flakes being a collection of individual crystals that stick together) that fall into a layer of air warm enough to melt them into raindrops, and then continue downward into another layer of colder air that leads to freezing of the droplets into sleet pellets. The crystalline structure of snow results from a combination of the unique shape of water vapor molecules and the fact that snow crystals are formed by the direct deposition of these vapor molecules onto other water molecules directly from vapor to ice, without becoming liquid first. Even then, there is a huge variety of possible crystal shapes that depend on the temperature and relative humidity at which the crystal forms, and whether those conditions remain steady or change while the crystal is being "built." For more information, including some nice diagrams and beautiful photos, you might like to check out www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/primer/primer.htm.
Feb. 7, 2013 | Tags: cool sites, snow, winter weather

Answer: That bit of folklore seems to rest on the idea that the first snow will remove contaminants from the air that could be bad for someone consuming snow cream made with it. However, that ignores the fact the the "second snow" or any that follow are likely to have had as much of an interval since the first one as the first snow had since the most recent rain, which should have accomplished the same sort of contaminant removal, or that any pollutants in the air that are scoured out by precipitation are likely to recover to their typical background levels quite rapidly once a precipitation system has moved out of the area. Bottom line is, so long as the snow is deep enough and "fluffy" enough to make otherwise aesthetically pleasing snow cream, there is very little likelihood that freshly fallen snow collected from an open area, and otherwise undisturbed, would contain pollutants or contaminants in sufficient quantity to be a health hazard, regardless of whether it is the first of the winter or not.
Feb. 6, 2013 | Tags: folklore, snow, weather & health