Thanksgiving 2015: Warm and Icy, 10 Year Records

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 stacked up locally here in State College, Pennsylvania.

The big story this year was a snow, ice and rain storm that snarled traffic on Wednesday and Thursday in the central U.S. (NOTE: The ice storm continued for three days!)

Below is what our forecast Thanksgiving map (loop) looked like (here's what it looked like on radar; our Thanksgiving forecast graphics are shown below; here's an animation of our Black Friday forecasts).

As you can see, this was the first Thanksgiving with our newly-redesigned forecast maps! The coverage of freezing rain we were forecasting in the Central U.S. was impressive:

However, on the same day, warm air filled the East, with temperatures in the 50s in New England and 60s and 70s in the rest of the Northeast!

Meanwhile, a rare hurricane (in fact the strongest ever this late in the season for the Eastern Pacific) lurked off the coast on Thanksgiving Day -- Category 4 Hurricane Sandra (only the second time in the last 10 years; previous occurrence was Tropical Storm Delta on Thanksgiving at the end of the gangbusters 2005 hurricane season).

Locally here in State College, Pennsylvania, this was the second-warmest Thanksgiving (high temperature) since I began blogging 10 years ago:

Now that I've been tracking the local weather for 10 years, I'd like to announce the 10-year record Thanksgiving events for State College, Pennsylvania:

COLDEST: 2013
WARMEST: 2007
RAINIEST: 2010
SNOWIEST: 2005*

*Last year, 2014, was a runner up for daily snow, the most snow during the period for November and a tie for snow cover -- both days had inches of snow on the ground Thanksgiving morning.

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

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