It is definitely nice to see a nice change of pace.  Through much of the summer dating back to August we couldn’t buy rain.  Over the last week or so we have certainly seen the return of plentiful rain.  The graphic below shows the break down of the last month and the start of April and how they compare to the recent rains that have graced the area.  It is obvious to see that our 8 day stretch where we saw at least a trace of rain was more than all of March and almost the first half of April combined.  In fact about 35 percent of the rain (liquid equivalent with snow in winter) fell during those 8 days.   The numbers were taken at the Rochester International Airport.

Rainfall Amounts

Even though we have had all of this rain as of late, we are still considered to be in a severe drought with our deficit from last August still running about 8 inches.  With that said obviously any rain is good rain to help this situation, but we would like to see more.  Here is the current drought monitor from the USDA.

Minnesota:

Iowa:

Posted under climate, Drought, rainfall, rainfall amounts, spring

A winter event of this magnitude occuring at this time of the year in this part of the country is pretty much unheard of.  Over 30 inches of snow fell in some parts of New England.  As of 7:00pm on Sunday night, there were over 3 million people without power.  One of the reasons that this event was so catastrophic was the fact that there were still leaves on the trees.  The heavy wet snow accumulated on the leaves and branches and basically tore many trees down.  Check out some of these storm totals from yesterdays Nor’ Easter.  This is mind blowing.

Check out this satellite image.  This is a visable satellite image from Sunday morning and I want to point out two features.  The storm kind of looks like a hurricane as it developed an “eye” l.ike feature as it intensfied over the warmer waters of the Atlantic.  The othe area i want to show is in the red polygon.  That white inside this polygon is not cloud cover, but rather the snow that is on the ground. 

I mentioned that this is a visable satellite image.  Visable satellite needs light to work so once the sun sets on the part of the world it is looking at, the visable image comes back black.  It “sees” the clouds by looking at the reflected light back to the satellite.  On a clear day, the satellite will “see” the ground.  Since snow is very white and bright, like a thick cloud, it reflects a lot of sunlight and thats how the satellite can “see” the snow.

Posted under just cool