Capital Weather Gang Article:
Sixty years ago, after a gentle start, winter took the South by storm
Capital Weather Gang
Sixty years ago, after a gentle start, winter took the South by storm
Two men stand outside their car in unusually snowy winter in western North Carolina in the early months of 1960. (North Carolina Museum of History)
By Kevin Myatt
February 22 at 8:56 AM
Sixty years ago, a switch flipped on a fairly tame winter in mid-February, and snow piled up over cars and drifted higher than houses in some areas of the South that virtually never see that kind of snow.
Meanwhile, typically snowier locations farther north such as Philadelphia and Washington were missed or grazed. They were passed over not only by a single snow event, as happened Thursday when eastern
North Carolina and southeastern Virginia saw two to five inches of wet snow, but by several storms over a six-week period.
Nashville has had
more snowfall so far this season than Washington. It also did when spring finally sprung in 1960.
Currently, the Music City, at 1.5 inches since November, has had almost an inch more than the paltry 0.6 inches for the nation’s capital. But Washington had a respectable two feet of snow in winter into early spring 60 years ago — while Nashville, incredibly, had more than a foot on top of that.
The winter and early spring of 1959-60 seemed to turn the eastern U.S. map upside down.
Nashville, with 38.5 inches, more than four times its annual average snowfall, also topped New York (34.1 inches) and almost equaled Boston (40.9 inches). Little Rock, likewise, topped Washington’s 24.3 inches, with 26.6 inches.
Knoxville, Tenn., buried all the East Coast cities with 57 inches — 15 inches more than it has gotten in any other winter. The
62.7 inches at Roanoke, Va., was similar to the annual average snowfall for Albany, N.Y. Mountainous Boone, N.C., topped 100 inches for the only time on record, more than 56 inches of which fell in March.
It was so much snow that railways and roads crossing the Appalachians were shut down for days as drifts several feet high piled up.
National Guard helicopters had to be deployed to deliver food and supplies in western North Carolina.
Perhaps even more amazing than the sheer magnitude of such huge snow totals so far south was that the vast majority of that snowfall occurred in a little more than five weeks, from Feb. 12 to March 20.
Knoxville, Tenn., buried all the East Coast cities with 57 inches — 15 inches more than it has gotten in any other winter. The
62.7 inches at Roanoke, Va., was similar to the annual average snowfall for Albany, N.Y. Mountainous Boone, N.C., topped 100 inches for the only time on record, more than 56 inches of which fell in March.
It was so much snow that railways and roads crossing the Appalachians were shut down for days as drifts several feet high piled up.
National Guard helicopters had to be deployed to deliver food and supplies in western North Carolina.
Perhaps even more amazing than the sheer magnitude of such huge snow totals so far south was that the vast majority of that snowfall occurred in a little more than five weeks, from Feb. 12 to March 20.
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A weather map on Feb. 13, 1960: A coast-hugging low near Hatteras, N.C., is dumping heavy snow on the Appalachians. (National Weather Service)
Children stand amid piles of snow along Route 460 near Christiansburg, Va., in late winter 1960. (Dean Mook)
Many residents of the Carolinas and Virginia
recall it snowing every Wednesday for a number of weeks.
The 1959-60 winter was in many ways the diametrical opposite of the current winter in terms of the large-scale atmospheric phenomena affecting North America.
Many residents of the Carolinas and Virginia
recall it snowing every Wednesday for a number of weeks.
The 1959-60 winter was in many ways the diametrical opposite of the current winter in terms of the large-scale atmospheric phenomena affecting North America.
In the 2019-20 winter, the Arctic Oscillation (AO) has been unrelentingly positive, signaling a strong polar vortex that is keeping the deepest cold air bottled up over the North Pole and far northern latitudes, not allowing it be exported southward into the contiguous 48 U.S. states.
In 1959-60, the AO went negative at Christmas and reached strongly negative levels by late January and early February, not moving back into positive territory until early April. The weaker winds aloft around the pole allowed Arctic air masses to penetrate far southward.
The snow surge of 1960 began with a classic storm that moved out of the Gulf of Mexico and curved up the East Coast in the Feb. 12-15 time frame.
Houston was first to know there was a problem,
as the Gulf storm delivered four inches of snow to the city. Houston had not seen so much snowfall since getting 20 inches in the famous 1895 Arctic outbreak and has not seen as much in any event since. Several inches of snow fell over much of the interior South, with more than a foot in the Appalachians of North Carolina and Virginia.
Over the Northeast, however, the low’s track cut inland, west of Boston, where only an inch fell before changing to rain.
Additional small-to-medium storms moved along a suppressed storm track across the South in the latter half of February, depositing more snow on regions not accustomed to seeing so much
By mid-March, high pressure over the western United States helped augment the movement of Arctic air into the East. This led to March average temperatures that were among the coldest on record in many locations in the central and eastern parts of the country. It was Charlotte’s only March to average less than 40 degrees at 39.7, colder than an average January in the Queen City and capping the snowiest fall-to-spring period on record with 22.6 inches.
Washington had its second-coldest March on record, averaging 35.6 degrees, behind only 34.9 in 1885.
A second storm originating near the Gulf of Mexico occurred in 1960 through March 2 and 3. Like the mid-February storm, the early March storm dumped several inches on the interior South and more than a foot on parts of the Appalachians. This one made a curve up the coast far enough out to sea to include the Eastern Seaboard cities in its bounty — eight inches fell in Washington, a foot in New York and almost 20 inches in Boston, half of its seasonal total, enough to move Beantown barely ahead of Nashville for the season
As far away as it may seem in this winter of 2019-20, a pattern somewhat similar to 1959-60 — delivering rounds of cold and snow deep to the South — remains a possibility for future winters.
Although climate change predicts that, in general,
winter snowfall totals will continue gradually decreasing in the South and that winters will tend to be milder more often, none of that entirely precludes a blocking pattern with a suppressed storm track similar to the 1959-60 winter developing for a few weeks.
The
infamously snowy 2009-10 winter had many of the same characteristics for an even longer time, but the storm tracks somewhat shifted northward compared to 1959-60