I dedicate this today's blog article to the NWS Weather Forecast Office at Philadelphia/Mt. Holly, NJ (NWS Mt. Holly) for taking very good care of us who live in your forecast area during a nor'easter that lasted over two days. The short video that I share below speaks to my profound gratitude for what the National Weather Service does to take care of us.
Direct link to video from the National Weather Service
Every so often I take a time-out to acknowledge and reflect on recent severe weather that impacted my area. I do so today after a winter nor'easter (neat graphic from NWS Mt. Holly) that lasted a couple days here in New Jersey and environs, dumping as much as 30 inches in parts of New Jersey. NWS Mt. Holly posted an annotated satellite image of this storm here. I was lucky, under 18 inches and I am dug and plowed out, thanks to my wonderful plow guys who take good care of me. In case you are wondering, there was enough shoveling to go around, so I did some. While I did not exactly play in the snow, I accidentally rolled around in the snow.
I am not a Meteorologist, but I know enough that forecasting winter weather poses challenges, even for the experts. Note the short video, again from the National Weather Service, on winter weather forecasting uncertainty.
Direct link to video from the National Weather Service
I am a volunteer, known as a sky warn spotter, for the NWS Mt. Holly. I went through a training course to be a spotter, and get recurrent training every three years. My primary task in the winter is to take snow fall measurements and report my measurements to NWS Mt. Holly. So, I was out in the storm every six hours, except at night, taking measurements off of my snow board (flagged so I can find it), cleaning the board off, and reporting the totals to NWS Mt. Holly. It is my great honor to be able to do this to help them out. Normally, I use two snow boards, but I decided that the trek out to my second board would be too much in that much snow, so that snow board remains buried in my back yard.
To my friends at NWS Mt. Holly, I can only imagine how hard you worked to provide us in your forecast area the best possible forecasts, with updates to the forecast to reflect changes. This was a long duration storm, over two days. I knew what to expect, fortunately, all in my household are working from home because of the pandemic. In addition to your work keeping up to date on what the nor'easter was doing, you answered phone calls from the public, press, and skywarn spotters. When I called in with my reports, you are always kind and patient. Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you. I am no longer a member of team snow, but snow is what it is and I have been living in the northeast my whole life. Nor'easters like this happen. I knew the worse case scenario, and when that scenario happened you took care of us and used your social media platforms to keep us up to date.
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