We had snow most all of yesterday starting around 9 AM when the temperatures were around 10 degrees F and continuing through the day and into the night. Most of that snow was very, very fine, light powder and really didn't amount to much except where it drifted.
Sometime during the night the snow switched to freezing rain/rain mixture as the temperatures rose. (It was 32 degrees F this morning but has since dropped again to 25 degrees F.)
Around 10 AM it had pretty much let up and I went out to shovel a few areas where and the heavy wet goop the snow plow had left at the end of the driveway. Of course, as I was shoveling, it started to snow again--and snow pretty hard. This continued until near 4 PM this afternoon.
Looking at the radar maps I can pretty well determine what happened. The storm was formed around a cold front coming in from the west. As it approached this area, the moist warm air swept north-northeast along the front but the front itself moved from the west to the east. Unfortunately, as it approached central PA the front stalled. It just plain old stopped moving from west to east. The belt of precipitation along that front, however, continued to move from the south-southwest to the north-northeast and we were directly in its path.
So we had a conveyor belt of precipitation--most of it pretty cold--hanging over us for much of the morning and early afternoon. The front has now just barely inched its way to the east and we have colder air in place but--for the moment--no precipitation.
What's on the ground now can wait until tomorrow to be cleaned up. It's not deep enough for the snow blower being only 2-3 inches where it hasn't drifted and 4-5 where it has. It's too heavy to shovel in comfort or with any speed.
I forgot to mention: the belt of precipitation also passed over the Bolt Hole up in the Adirondacks where it was almost exclusively snow. I'm sure there's between 6 and 10 inches of fresh snow on the ground up there.
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