What A Difference 5 Miles Makes

People often talk about the way weather varies greatly across a few miles. Today here in State College, PA, we are witnessing a good example of that.

Around 2:30 today I checked the AccuCam to see if any snow was accumulating.

Nothing.

But to my surprise, 5 miles away at my house, my webcam showed a winter wonderland!

What gives?

I took a quick look at the AccuWeather.com radar display, shown below.

I know I'm somewhere under the blue and green stuff on the radar above, but I don't know where exactly. To solve this question, we'll have to go in-depth with our AccuWeather.com RadarPlus product. This application, which runs in your web browser, allows you to zoom into street-level to watch radar, satellite, lightning and surface observations.

I load in an animation (see links below), zoom to city level and the answer is clear. Heavy snow has been training* north to south over my house (the "X" to the northeast of town) for the last two hours while AccuWeather HQ (the "X" to the southwest) has been left in a gap between snow bands.

Normally weather here in Centre county moves west to east so there is little difference between the two locations. But today, we're on the back side of the low pressure system where the broad counterclockwise circulation makes the vertical snow bands move north to south this afternoon. Click here for a close-up movie or view one zoomed further out, to see the snow bands training over Centre county today.

*Training refers to precipitation which continually moves over the same area, like a train on tracks.