Late week Ohio Valley/Mid-Atlantic snowstorm

Thursday update:

Water vapor imagery shows the upper trough digging into the south-central U.S.

Winter storm warnings cover 52 of West Virginia's 55 counties (tip of Northern Panhandle excluded).  Major models have converged.  There's fairly high confidence in enough snow to make road travel extremely difficult or impossible and cause power outages.  Exact snowfall totals only matter so much beyond the point where everything shuts down, and much of the state can expect to reach that point.

The NAM has sharpened the temperature gradient at 700 mb (about 3 km above ground), focusing warm advection into a narrower band.  If this verifies, areas under that band of enhanced ascent will see snowfall rates pushing 2" per hour for several hours Friday night.  Plows and salt can't keep up with that.


Wednesday morning update:

Snow lovers rejoice!

NWS Charleston has covered all but the southernmost areas with a winter storm watch for 6"+ in the lower elevations and 12"+ in the mountains.  These are conservative, no-hype numbers.

Models are converging on the Euro's original idea of the surface low's track.  A more southerly track will mean less of a chance for other precip types to mix in.  There might still be brief intervals of sleet in southern WV, but the greatest ice accumulation should remain well south of the state.  This track brings ever so slightly colder air, such that a terrain-induced warm wedge west of the high elevations is less likely to take a big bite out of accumulations.  Furthermore, the track of the second surface cyclone up the Atlantic coast--the nor'easter--puts WV in a good place to catch wraparound snow on the back side all day Saturday.

Let's look at Weather Prediction Center probabilities...

I-64 corridor from Huntington to Charleston, that's a 50/50 shot at reaching a foot.



Original Tuesday morning post:

Take-home points:

1. Enough snowfall to make travel extremely difficult or impossible across most of West Virginia is looking more and more likely.  Forecast models are trending toward a storm comparable to the major snows of last winter.  Be prepared by Thursday evening.

2. Take forecasts of enormous snow totals with a grain of salt for the next 24 hours.  The big numbers being spewed out by some models are entirely possible, but there are a couple different ways the storm could realistically fail to produce accumulating snow for some of WV.

3. A relatively small swath of western/southwestern/central WV may see some ice accumulation.  A few power outages could result.

For specific point forecasts, NWS Charleston is here: http://www.weather.gov/rlx/.

Details:

West Virginia, the hype is more or less real.  Major models agree that heavy snow is likely for most of the state between Thursday night and Saturday morning.

However, we're 3-4 days out.  Forecasting a fast-moving, amplifying wave at this range relies almost exclusively on numerical models.  The upper wave responsible for the storm?  Still off the West Coast, where weather balloons can't sample it and we're dependent on satellite data.

Upper wave over the Pacific that becomes eastern U.S. snowstorm in major models

One reason I'm not comfortable promising a huge snowfall for WV at this point is the likelihood of downslope warming west of the mountains.  Depending on the track of the surface low--which major models do not have pegged, by the way, with the European going down into Alabama, the GFS in Tennessee, and the NAM in Kentucky--winds will be more or less out of the east in the WV mountains.  Air descending the western slopes to higher pressure levels will warm somewhat.  Both NAM and GFS bring surface temperatures in the lower elevations to about 33 F during the day Friday, potentially knocking down accumulations.  Good news for snow lovers is that it's brutally cold across WV right now.  Most areas brought to the melting point by downsloping on Friday would be reaching that point for the first time all week.  The ground will still be quite cold.

Another way for the snowstorm to flop is for a large part of the precip to fall as freezing rain and/or sleet.

Refresher on the difference between freezing rain and sleet, courtesy NWS

NAM and other SREF members are strongly suggesting a short period of moderate to heavy freezing rain in western WV sometime early Friday.  Accurately predicting precip type requires nailing down the vertical profile of temperature in the atmosphere.  One degree in a given layer can be the difference between a crippling snowfall and an inch of sleet.  So at this range, with the wave still offshore, it's a crapshoot.  The point is that if a lot of the precip falls as freezing rain and/or sleet, snow totals will be minimized.  Also know that significant ice accumulation from freezing rain can lead to power outages, so prepare for that possibility.

Heroin and earthquakes

I grew up in the unincorporated community of Scott Depot, West Virginia, about halfway between Huntington and Charleston.  When I was there at Christmas, I went in the Sheetz gas station that was built after we got our own I-64 exit.  I opened the door to the bathroom stall on the right, looked down, and saw an empty Arnold Palmer can with the bottom sliced off.  The bottom of the can lay next to it with a burned circle and some brownish residue in the middle.  A trace of the same residue was on top of the toilet paper dispenser.  So I went in the other stall.  While I was there, a boy of maybe five or six walked into the one I had just left.  I could see the can on the floor and didn't take my eyes off it until he stepped out.

Scott Depot was an easy and safe place to grow up. My kindergarten class took walking field trips.  Scott Teays Elementary was one of the best schools in the state; that's not what I heard on this trip back.  The playground, a hundred feet from the main road through town, wasn't fenced; it is now.  My friends and I slept outside in tents at least one night every summer.  We prowled around neighbors' yards clothed in all black while playing spotlight.  We walked and biked through the "worst" neighborhoods in town unsupervised and unconcerned.  So did my future wife and her girlfriends, at thirteen.  The most serious danger to us was definitely us.

Heroin was some exotic scourge like Ebola that we only learned about in health class.  None of us ever imagined encountering it half a mile down the road.  The most substance abuse we ever saw was the Mountain Dew bottles full of tobacco spit skittering around the school bus floor--at least until the day, not long before I left for OU, that kids on our street saw something taken from a neighbor's crawl space and cash left in its place.

Scott Depot is only on the fringe of the crisis.  It's still a safe place on the whole.  Heroin turning up there is like debris falling miles from a tornado:  You might be okay for the moment, but someplace nearby is being ravaged.  There are plenty of articles about the painkiller and heroin epidemics around the Appalachian coalfields.  I'm not going to copy and paste them all.  The one that prompted this post is here:

Major Drug Roundup near Oceana Leads to 49 Arrests

You might brush off that headline.  Drug crackdowns happen across the United States every day.  But Wyoming County had a population of 22,598 in 2014.  All of those arrested were dealers, not merely users, and sold to undercover officers.  They weren't selling weed; they were selling things that kill.  And they were all busted between 7 a.m. and noon on Wednesday.

0.22 percent of Wyoming County was arrested for dealing painkillers and heroin in five hours.

Suppose each dealer has 10 regular customers.  Suppose this sweep nabbed half the pushers in the county.  Then 4.4 percent of the county would be using; with an average household size of 2.45 people, the expected number of Wyoming County doors on which you'd need to knock to find an addict would be 10.

I have no idea how this can be fixed.  Though nobody can accuse President Obama and his EPA of helping the situation, coal jobs were vanishing anyway.  Appalachia doesn't have a drug crisis because coal is going away.  It has a drug crisis because coal going away doesn't leave much.  Forbes ranks West Virginia as the worst state in which to do business, primarily because it has the lowest college attainment rate and is the only state steadily losing population, but also because of its bottom-ranked regulatory environment.  (Apparently the state government imposes a heavier regulatory burden on businesses than any other, but still couldn't keep one from spilling a whole tank of chemicals directly into the capital city's water supply.)  It's easy to say, "Finish college and elect better leaders."  Getting it done is clearly a different matter.  The state has spent an incomprehensible sum on the in-state Promise scholarship.  Voters got frustrated with Democrats and gave the state legislature to Republicans.  It hasn't been very long, but so far, no dice.

I shouldn't have been so surprised.  It just makes me sad.  On a hill that sits back from Teays Valley Road, there's a subdivision where I hung out with a kindergarten friend who'd be the best man in my wedding.  Between that and the roadway, there's an assisted living home where my grandma lived for years.  Across a little field from that, there's a local hardware store that put my name on its marquee when I went to the spelling bee.  And right on the other side of Teays Valley Road, the day after Christmas, somebody walked into the gas station, slipped a can of tea and lemonade under his jacket, went into the bathroom, drained the can, cut off the bottom, placed some heroin in the center, held a lighter under the metal until the drug melted, sucked it up with a syringe, and jabbed it into a vein.  He stumbled out alive, this time.  Maybe we passed in the store.  I walked in.  So did that boy, whose childhood West Virginia has darker corners than mine ever did.

____________

Oil and gas are to Oklahoma what coal once was to West Virginia.  The night after the Wyoming County drug sweep, a series of ~4.0 earthquakes occurred in northwestern Oklahoma.  Minor, mostly imperceptible quakes jumped off the charts here right around the time injection wells for waste water from fracking became widespread.  The correlation or amazing coincidence, depending on whom you ask, is a point of bitter contention among academics, energy companies, and residents.

I'll take the earthquakes.