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AccuWeather Meteorologist and Social Media Manager Jesse Ferrell covers extreme weather and the intersection of meteorology and social media.
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Weather Blogs / WeatherMatrix
Winter storm brings biggest January severe outbreak in 20 years
Published Jan 13, 2020 10:15 PM EDT
The huge winter storm I talked about on Friday brought deadly tornadoes, 4 inches of sleet to Easton, Maine, half an inch of freezing rain to New York state and an 89-mph wind gust to Morgantown, WV.
This radar image chronicles the storm:
AccuWeather.com radar from Jan. 10-12, 2020.
You can read more in our tornado and ice wrap-up stories. At least 11 people were killed.
Over 700 severe weather warnings were issued by the National Weather Service from San Antonio to Chicago and Philadelphia.
Severe advisories animation during the duration of the storm. Huge portions of the eastern U.S. were covered in pink (high wind) and green (flood) advisories.
Pie charts of warnings and storm reports during the storm showed the predominant warning was Severe Thunderstorm, and the predominant spotter report was wind damage.
There were over 1,000 spotter reports issued during the 1/10-1/12 storm, more than during any January in the last 20 years.
This photo provided by Bossier Parish Sheriff's Office shows damage from Friday night's severe weather in Bossier Parish, La., on Saturday, Jan. 11, 2020. Several people were killed in Louisiana, including an elderly couple found near their trailer home Saturday by firefighters. (Lt. Bill Davis/Bossier Parish Sheriff's Office via AP)
Over half a million customers were without power at the height of the storm - some from ice, some from high winds and some from thunderstorms.
Over 250,000 lightning strikes hit the ground from this system, according to LightningMaps.Org.
This animation (from AccuWeather) shows lightning strikes from January 10 to 12.
Winds gusted over 70 mph in Massachusetts, Tennessee and West Virginia.
Ice up to half an inch thick plagued New York state.
The storm also broke dozens of high temperature (and high minimum temperature) records across the East. Boston hit 74; Charleston, West Virginia, broke their daily record by 9 degrees. Here are a few examples, a more comprehensive list is available for Saturday and Sunday.
Selected records broken over the weekend.
Temperatures approaching records each hour through the weekend.
Over 6 inches of rain fell across the Midwest, leading to widespread flooding.
Was it a derecho? I have heard this question on social media. The American Meteorological Society defines a derecho as "any family of particularly damaging downburst clusters produced by a mesoscale convective system... either continuously or intermittently over a swath of at least 400 mi and a width of approximately 60 mi or more." The NWS criteria are winds over 58 mph "over most of its length" for at least 240 miles, developing from a bow echo.
While this event certainly meets the mileage criteria -- from the map above, the wind reports were over 1,500 miles long -- I can't be sure that enough were over 58 mph along the path (orange is over 50 mph). More importantly, this system did not develop out of a bow echo in a Mesoscale Convective System (the NWS page referenced above explains how those systems are more common overnight in the Summer).
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