8 Inches of Snow in Louisiana, Mississippi!

UPDATE: Check out this satellite image from My Buddy Scott's Blog [JessePedia] which clearly shows the coverage of the snow.

The question this morning is: How much snow fell from this storm system that whitened parts of Texas and the Deep South, then coated a few Appalachian Slopes and northwest New England?

The government's snow recording system is primitive, with sparse stations that report only once a day. The public is welcomed to call in snow reports, but they aren't databased or mapped, and there is no quality control on them.

The best we can do is look at maps from NOHRSC showing the COOP (once a day) reports along with some scattered other data. These maps run 6-12 hours behind reality, so this morning all we can look at is the Deep South.

*

Even if some of the higher amounts don't appear on that map, you can get a general idea of the coverage. The NWS in New Orleans also plotted some reports on a map by hand, as did the NWS at Jackson. If you dig through all the Snow Spotter reports, you'll see these top amounts, some of which are just staggering for early December (I talked yesterday about the historical significance of the snow in Lousiana). The NWS says that 83,000 lost power. I thought this model prediction of 18 inches was ridiculous but I didn't think I'd see near 10 inches either!

Lawrence County, MS: 9.0" Bogue Chitto, MS: 8.0"** Amite, LA: 8.0"Washington, LA: 6.0" Opelousas, LA: 6.0" Covington, LA: 6.0" Hammond, LA: 6.0" Beaumont, TX: 4.0"

We also had 5 inch reports from readers like you who posted to our SnowMatrix from both MS & LA.

8 INCHES OF LOUISIANA SNOW | SEE ALSO PHOTO OF SNOW IN HOUSTON

*By the way, if you click through to the big map, that's not a "12.0" you see - it's a combination of 1.0 and 2.0.

**Technically this report was "6 to 10 inches" which they averaged out as 8 for the report.