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No Thanks For 1950
11/28/2002
Listen in RealAudio 
On Thanksgiving, we all try to remember all the things we have to be thankful for. The
Pilgrims, turkey, football. This year, be grateful 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 Bryan
Yeaton 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 backtracked toward Lake Erie. The result was a wild mix of conditions. While Pittsburgh
got dumped with snow at 9 degrees F, farther north, Buffalo, at 54 degrees, was being drenched
in heavy rain. Snow blanketed a strip from Michigan to Pennsylvania and down to the Carolinas.
Some of the amounts were stunning -- Coburn Creek, WV, for example, got 62 inches of snow over
several days. That's over 5 feet! Thanks a lot.
Then, there was the wind. Concord, New Hampshire and Hartford, Connecticut didn't get any
snow, but wind gusts topped 100 miles per hour -- the strongest windstorm ever seen in New
England outside of a hurricane, or on top of Mount Washington.
One reason we might actually be thankful for this storm was that it was studied through the
early '50s with some of the very first experiments in computer-based weather prediction. Later
on, in 1993, another Appalachian blizzard, the March "super storm," was predicted days ahead
of time by computer models whose design was born back on that Thanksgiving of 1950.
Thanks today to contributing writer Bob Henson for more information on the blizzard of 1950.
Visit our website, www.mountwashington.org, for more about some really high winds. The Weather
Notebook is underwritten by Subaru of America, with major support provided by the National
Science Foundation.
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