Local, National Thanksgiving Weather Review

As I do every year, I'd like to take a look at how the weather affected Thanksgiving and Black Friday on a national basis, and see where Turkey Day 2014 stacks up locally here in State College, Pennsylvania. Nationally this year, the big concentration was on the day before Thanksgiving, when a snowstorm struck the East. In fact, we didn't even do the Thanksgiving Day map until the day before:

For that reason, I don't have an animated Thanksgiving Map this year to see how the forecast changed over time. I do have two animations from Wednesday: The "Thanksgiving Travel Forecast Map" animated to show the storm itself, as well as the snow forecast map:

It has been unusually cold for most of the country for the past two weeks after a shot from the Polar Vortex. Other blogs I wrote for the Thanksgiving week snowstorm are shown here:

• Thanksgiving Snowstorm: 20 Inches & 300K Power Out (2014/11/28)

• Thanksgiving Nightmare Travel Snowstorm vs. 2013 (2014/11/24)

• And Snow It Begins: Thanksgiving Storm Rumors (2014/11/22)

Here in State College it was cold and snowy. It tied with 2005 as the 2nd coldest day (last year was the coldest in the period). It was the third "White Thanksgiving" (1 inch or more on the ground -- officially we only had 0.3 inches on Thanksgiving, but 4.1" the day before and 0.8" on Black Friday, for a total of 5.2" for November -- by far the snowiest November since 2005). Here's what it looked like on Thanksgiving Eve:

We delayed our trip (from State College to York PA) Wednesday afternoon to Thursday noon (see webcam shot), and still saw snow falling on the way down from State College, PA to York, PA. Here's what it looked like driving towards York:

Our return trip Friday was delayed until Saturday but we *still* had trouble then, as snow coated the ground in York (see webcam). Here's what the PennDot cams looked like on our way home:

Here are links to my previous blogs about past Thanksgiving weather:

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