The Weather Notebook: Giving Thanks It's Not 1950

Giving Thanks It's Not 1950
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Dave Thurlow, Host

On this, the last Thanksgiving of the century, what do we have to be grateful for in terms of the weather? Well, for one thing, be glad it's not 1950. That was the year much of the eastern U.S. got its coldest, windiest, snowiest Thanksgiving weekend ever. Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow from the Mount Washington Observatory and this is The Weather Notebook.

The culprit was a huge upper-level low that first moved down from Wisconsin to North Carolina, then retreated back to Lake Erie. The result was a wild mix of conditions. It was a ridiculously cold 9 degrees with heavy snow in Pittsburgh at the same time that Buffalo was being drenched in heavy rain at 54 degrees. Snow covered the ground from Michigan to Pennsylvania down to the Carolinas, and there were some truly monumental amounts, especially in West Virginia. For instance, Coburn Creek, WV measured 62 inches of snow over several days.

Then there was the wind. It didn't snow in Concord, New Hampshire, or Hartford, Connecticut, but the wind gusts were topping 100 miles per hour. It was the strongest windstorm ever seen in New England outside of a hurricane.

So, one reason we might be thankful for this storm was that it was studied in detail in the early 50's for some of the very first experiments in computer-based weather prediction. Later on, in 1993, another Appalachian blizzard, this time in March - the "super storm" it was called - was predicted days ahead of time by computer models whose design was started back on Thanksgiving, 1950.

Thanks today's to contributing writer Bob Henson and for more information on the blizzard of 1950, be sure to visit our website, mountwashington.org. Weather Notebook music is arranged and performed by Georg Brandl. Our show is underwritten by Subaru, with major support provided by the National Science Foundation.