Sublimation

It's not last winter anymore. Tom's 2.5 inch-an-hour rate for Thursday a.m. looks accurate, which would mean that more snow would have fallen in 7 minutes and 30 seconds than fell all last winter at PHL. Also, the 0.6 at PHL Friday would be double the 2019-20 total.

Wow... might be the only time in recorded history that the Mount Washington summit was a weather refuge ...

This was about as bad as it could ever get, with amounts measured in inches; a legend in Montreal ... a record El Nino winter ... https://www.weather.gov/media/btv/events/IceStorm1998.pdf

Very good, thanks. And this won't be that.

And, Tony, correct me if wrong, but and advisory would be pro forma (I had to find some use for two years of Latin) for even a "trace" of freezing rain, correct? Warning for PHL would be 0.25. You happen to recall the last major freezing-rain event? I recall that the one in February 2014 knocked out power to close to 600,000, but that came within 18 hours of heavy snow, and all that weight is what did in the limbs. I always considered that one event.

And NWS has issued a WWA... https://forecast.weather.gov/showsigwx.php?warnzone=PAZ104&warncounty=PAC091&firewxzone=PAZ104&local_place1=Plymouth Meeting PA&product1=Winter+Weather+Advisory&lat=40.1087&lon=-75.2808#.YCbo3ZNKi3I

On the plus side, thanks to that winter, neither Penndot nor any other road department is likely to run out of salt. An incredible salt shortage made things a whole lot worse; just imagine a sequence of ice storms without treated roads. Salt was gold; all the highway departments ran out of it. Penndot was ordering supplies based on the previous recent winters in which not much happened, save for March 1993. They haven't made that mistake since. That's why these day you're likely to see stockpiles vomiting out of the salt domes when you drive past them.

Yes, and January 1994 was the last time PHL hit zero.

Mount Holly updated storm total for PHL now 8.1 ...

Tony... Thank you for doing this. The same question violated my mind's don't-walk sign. Re PDII in 2003, if memory serves, technically the 2.0 on the 15th actually was a separate event. Gary S. appealed to Dave "Dr. Snow" Robinson, who decreed that they were two events. I will check that with Gary tomorrow, but that's what I recall. My memories of 1917 are vague.

KU books are amazing ... hard to believe they could put those together while holding full-time jobs, and Uccellini was a honcho. Images are amazing.

Our son also recommends "Touching the Void," and Gil Gaul high on "Migrations," neither of which I've read yet.

Greg, A few other suggestions.... These two might betray my journalistic bias because they are both prodigiously reported: --"The Children's Blizzard," by David Laskin, about the real blizzard of '88... incredibly sad story but wonderfully told. --"Geography of Risk," by Gilbert M. Gaul, former colleague and one of the best reporters on earth; this is a look at the consequences of risky building. Also: --"Into Thin Air," Krakauer, and "Alive," Pears Paul Read, weather-related and amazing for narrative detail, although don't eat before reading the latter. F

Yes, 1995-96 was relentless. If you subtract Jan. 7-8, it still finishes in the Philly Top 20 (85 percentile if my math is right) for snow in the period of record.

Re: the amazing disappearing snow. Dave Robinson, the N.J. state climatologist (and still is) opined that the way the dewpoint erased that snow cover on Jan. 19, 1996, was even more impressive than the snowfall itself. The PHL high was 62 and the dewpoint probably was close to that, and most of that snow was gone before the rain even started. The flooding on the Susquehanna was particularly nasty on the 20th.