Near-Miss White Christmas and Past Weather
I've not been as dedicated in reporting on Christmas weather in our nation and my backyard as I have during Thanksgiving, probably because I'm usually off work for an extended period. But in this entry, I'd like to summarize Christmas weather since I started blogging in 2005. First, locally:
This year, snow was the big story, but ironically none "officially" fell on December 25th.* Several inches fell on Christmas Eve and it was a little harrowing to go to dinner in York, PA, and this is what the webcams back here in State College looked like:
On Christmas Day, I drove back from York, Pennsylvania to my home in State College at midnight, to beat the heavy snow that was to begin on December 26 (we got 13 inches total!).It looked awesome on the Christmas decorations:
*The new "day" starts at 7 PM in meteorology. Otherwise, we would have had several inches on Dec. 25 in both 2010 and 2012.
Below is what our (new, HD) Christmas Day forecast map looked like this year (see also Christmas Eve).
Nationally speaking, the big story on Christmas Day 2012 was the severe weather. A record number of tornadoes (for Dec. 25) raked the South. Below are some radar / warning loops (download hi-res).
In 2010, my Mom down in North Carolina got her second White Christmas in a row (something I've never seen here in Pennsylvania during my 15-year residence!) That storm moved on to the Northeast as the Boxing Day Blizzard, but somehow managed to mostly avoid me in State College. 2009 was fairly uneventful, and I wrote in my blog at Christmas 2008 about My Past White Christmases (1981, 1989, 1993 in NC & 2002 in PA):
"Looking back at my blog entries... in 2007, we had rain, and plenty of it -- with considerable local flooding on December 23rd. In 2006, it actually snowed on Christmas, when I was in Milesburg, PA at my parents-in-law's house, but didn't accumulate. We had just missed it - I took a photo where the ground was white 2 days before Christmas but a heat wave with rain afterwards melted it all before Christmas. And way back in 2005, my first year of blogging for AccuWeather.com, we had a little freezing rain Christmas morning."
Report a Typo
