Feb 6th, 2014
I had thought about doing this sooner and likely should have.
Brief background:
Many of you have known me for years as I was born and raised in New Castle, DE. I moved away for college and never came back. I've lived in Lynchburg VA since 1996.
The weather hobby:
As a child, my goal was to become a TV weatherman. If you all remember Jim O'Brian from ABC in Philly was my hero and the poor guy died in parachute accident in 1983 ish. I was very good at math and science but really didn't know much about weather other than the guys on TV and the National Weather Service. Of all things, My blind father got me into weather.
At some point: I just became interested in other things. I'm not sure why but there were multiple factors. I think one issue surely was that I had a pretty intense stutter and figured that I could never do TV. Had I know the other opportunities, things could have been different. I actual did a 3 week intensive speech therapy program when I was 29 and it really changed my life. I looked back into Meteorology AFTER getting my Masters in Counseling and even knocking out part of my PhD. I did a large portion of an operational meteorology degree but never finished because I got married and had a child. :)
On an exciting note- I did cut a demo 3 years ago for a local TV station. The local guy had turned on to my blog and noted my skill. Honestly, the presentation was lousy because I had no experience on the green screen and the speech targets I use had some extra stress with me trying to do the clicking and pointing. With practice, I know I could have done 100x better. With that, if I can ever make a little money from this blog, I'd love to buy some software that would allow me to cut vidoes for these blogs.
So, this is a nice consolation prize. I try to update when big weather events are on the way and winter weather is clearly my favorite. With the advent of online writers getting weather gigs, maybe there is hope for something. At one point, I could name every big and small snowstorm from about 1980 or so and with age I've lost some of the smaller events but any big snow in Delaware between 1980 and 1993 or so I could tell you WAY too much information about it.
Active year so far after 2-3 lousy winters with Wilmington Airport having over 30 inches so far. A normal winter is around 20 inches, but normal has not been the rule for a while with either VERY big years or very small years.
Looking at the weekend--
The famous FB blizzard map that went viral isn't happening. If the jet streams had "phased" meaning worked together, a bigger event would have been possible. It seems the first piece comes through Saturday with a chance for snow, at this time more likely to coat the ground in Central and Southern Delaware and the second piece Sunday, more likely to coat the ground in Northern Delaware.
Another even is looming for Wednesday and Thursday. Anything 5-6 days away is harder to nail down finer details. We will have colder air in place, but slowly easy out as a low pressure comes out of the Gulf of Mexico. This usually means snow changing to ice then rain. There can still be a DECENT event, but seems harder to be an all snow event.
I'll do another blog updating these events PLUS giving some of guidelines on how to get the most of this blog. Share my blog on FB and Twitter-- it really helps. I'm adding Google ad sense so when you see something interesting click on an ad and it does pay me for my time. :)
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