SnowloverSid

The sky looks awfully ominous here in St. Louis, as though a lot of rain could fall. The temperature is pleasantly cool, in the low-70s.

Summer weather is on our doorstep— we might not see truly cool air in St. Louis until October. The entire week— except for one day— looks sultry.

We just received another that thunderstorm with a downpour in St. Louis. It is also beginning to get cool here: we have fallen from 83 to 61 in barely three hours.

There are tornado warnings within 10 miles of me— south and northeast. The rain is still coming down heavily, and I saw some bright lightning a few minutes ago.

We are getting quite the downpour here in St. Louis— although as I write this, it is slowing down. Still, it beats Tuesday evening’s yawner of a shower. Skies have that foreboding dark gray look to them, and I will be keeping my ears ready for hail.

I felt like a 7-year- old at Christmas on December 25, 1968. I would see my first partial eclipse only 15 months later, in March 1970. Lol.

Binghamton appears to be in a donut hole— very little precipitation has fallen in the last few hours, and the temperature is still in the upper-30s and falling very slowly. This April could join March, December, and November as months with less snowfall than normal there.

I checked Binghamton’s hourly precipitation count overnight and got excited because it was quite high: in fact, over a fifth of an inch fell in one hour overnight. I then realized that the bulk of the precipitation was rain or ZR. I wouldn’t have been happy if I were still in Binghamton, having narrowly missed out on an impressive amount of snow. They did break the daily precipitation record from this date in 1968 ( about three quarters of an inch) with one inch plus and counting. They are approaching the wettest- to- date cumulative total for March, and with two more storms headed their way, the 2008 March precipitation record could be within reach.

Videos of the hail and rain IMG_1566.MOV IMG_1565.MOV

We have had some hail, about three- eighths of an inch in diameter, over the last 10 minutes in St. Louis, though the rain has merely been light to moderate and the thunder is a mere rumble so far.

The weather turned out almost exactly as expected: hardly any rain after midnight and very little snow. It is a good thing that itis no longer near where I live: missed snowstorms and a whole lot of rain this winter— and five eighths of their snow to date was in January.

This month could be very much like March 1983: very mild to start; then turning cold right after the equinox. That is probably when it will snow. April 1983 still holds the record for monthly snowfall.

That thundersnow event may have occurred in early March 1972 ( when the temperature in our part of upstate NY plunged from 60-20 within hours. Or, it may have been around St. Patrick’s Day 1973, when the temperature plunged from the upper-60s to the upper-20s within a few hours. I will try to think of other possibilities.

The wind is getting stronger here in St. Louis; the temperature at Lambert Field plunged 77-54 in the last hour. Rain has been anything but impressive; the last truly exciting rainstorm or thunderstorm here was last May 14 (but not April 15, as I had posted a few weeks ago).

Six weeks away— Saturday, April 6– or, six years and six weeks away: Saturday, April 6, 2030. The long- range forecast for one is as hard to discern as the other!