A Thanksgiving Note!

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Just another day on this most excellent planet is reason enough to be thankful, but I wanted to write a note to all the readers of this blog and viewers of WBZ to say I appreciate what you add to our weather story every day! Here in New England we're blessed with ever-changing weather that brings life to our routines and conversation to our diners and coffee shops. There's always an interesting wrinkle or story line developing here, which is why it's the best place on Earth to be a weather geek.

Your daily reports, photos, tweets, and general interest helps us to tell the story of weather for the whole community. It'd be a pretty boring and lonely job without all the input that you offer. Back not too long ago it was just a few people you'd hear from via the phone (a land line of course) and a letter or two in the mail. The game has definitely changed with the sharing of information, thoughts, photos, and storm reports online that make the weather picture we see and tell so much deeper than it used to be.

So here's to another year of storms and sunshine, heat waves and cold snaps, beach days and ski trips. I hope you had an excellent holiday, have been enjoying the early season snow, and will stay tuned this winter as we shovel a little more!

Some Notables From The Recent Storm....

A few tidbits as an addendum to this note. Of course, it can snow in November. Some pretty big storms have rolled through, too. But it's not exactly typical that we get a snowstorm this time of year. And the one we saw Wednesday was actually capable of bringing down some records and a vast amount of power lines/trees in the process.

Daily snowfall records were set in Worcester, Albany, Concord, and Windsor Locks. A 'daily' record is basically the same as saying 'it was the snowiest November 26th on record.' Most of them were crushed, and Albany's had stood for 136 years! The final total in Albany was 10.4", the 5th largest November snowstorm ever recorded there.

The jackpot, as expected, was north-central MA and New Hampshire. Some big totals for an early season storm were posted. This produced the 4th largest power outage in New Hampshire state history with well over 200,000 customers in the dark at the height of the outages. Over 170k spent their Thanksgiving holiday without the usual comforts of electricity to entertain. Several shelters are open across the state as very cold air will stick around for a couple more days, and power crews say it will take another 3-4 before they can get everyone back up and running.

Power outages were also a big issue in Maine, where it's been a very snowy start to the season. With this storm, Bangor has now seen its snowiest November ever recorded with 25.9" so far. The previous record was 24.6" set in 1962. It's also now the 6th snowiest on record in Caribou with 26.7" to date.

Travel plans taking you to the Berkshires? The higher elevations to the west stacked up significant snow from this storm. The usual suspects like Peru and Savoy helped lead the pack.

Of course totals were much lower in eastern Massachusetts...with a sloppy mess of rain, snow, and sleet. It was pretty interesting driving around for work the other day. You'd see different conditions everywhere you went. Slow but not impossible travel. Even though it was a mess heading out on Tuesday with such heavy volume, it would have been much worse on Wednesday. On a mainly deserted Mass Pike I still saw about 4 spinouts/crashes from Worcester to Allston during the evening. There were also numerous accidents reported in Holliston, Sharon, and Attleboro (mainly due to sleet).

Now our inverted trough is producing more snowfall across the area, but in particular the spots that didn't get it with the main storm. A few inches may stack up in parts of eastern MA, especially the Boston area and South Shore. Many of these towns have seen snow 4 separate times this November! That's actually pretty rare stuff. We'll see if active weather sticks around for the *real* winter.