Thundersnow in New York, NC

Thundersnow is occurring this morning near Oswego New York and AccuWeather.com RadarPlus has detected 18 lightning strikes in 5 locations off and onshore from Lake Ontario (click map to enlarge).

At around 11 a.m. Eastern, the official weather station at Fulton, New York reported these conditions:

For you non-meteorologists that translates to:

30 degrees with Heavy Snow, Visibility 1/4 Mile, distant lightning to the northwest

...which sounds about right looking at the lightning map above.

New York isn't the only location that had thundersnow today. WeatherMatrix Member Paul Cowan was awake at 3 a.m. last night to report on the WeatherMatrix Forums that some snow and sleet (or hail, hard to tell the difference in those situations) fell north of Raleigh, NC (Six Degrees of Weather Separation: I used to live north of Raleigh -- here, precisely, probably not far from where Paul is).

That made me think of my experiences with thundersnow. I've experienced it several times and it is always surreal. My most memorable experience was during the Blizzard of 1993. Many people in western North Carolina heard thunder that evening as heavy snow was falling, including WeatherMatrix Member Tim Armstrong, who lived in Hickory at the time. (Another Six Degrees of Weather Separation: I lived a few miles to his northwest and we would meet getting our meteorlogy degrees at UNC-A a year later). He even got video of the observation on, er, a TV station (you didn't hear it from me but you can see the screen cap on the 1993 link above). I also witnessed thundersnow (on weather maps at least) in November 2003 and January 2005.

What is Thundersnow?

Thundersnow is simply snow falling during a thunderstorm. It is rare because heat is generally required to spark and maintain thunderstorm development. It takes a very strong storm such as the 1993 superstorm, or storms during the transition seasons of Spring or Fall, like we are seeing today, where an unusual amount of cold air sneaks in behind a thunderstorm.

Have you ever seen thundersnow? Tell your stories with that or other unusual weather on the WeatherMatrix Forums "Weather Experiences" board.

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