Friday, April 25, 2008

STATE OF EMERGENCY FOR TOMPKINS COUNTY

NUMEROUS STATES OF EMERGENCY ARE IN EFFECT, INCLUDING FOR TOMPKINS COUNTY, DUE TO THE EXTREME FIRE DANGER!

Tompkins County:
Under State of Emergency through April 30th. All outdoor burning and recreational outdoor fires are banned. The ban does not include controlled cooking fires when the fire is in a contained, controlled fireplace, barbecue grill or cooking pit. Individuals cooking outdoors must at all times have readily available the proper equipment to extinguish the fire.

Other counties are taking precautions as well:

Cayuga County:
A State of Emergency is in effect through May 4th, but could be extended. A burn ban is in effect.

Cortland County:
No open burning is permitted until further notice.

Jefferson County:
From Tuesday, April 22 at noon through Sunday, April 27 at noon, no one in the county is allowed to set an open fire, including burn barrels. This order supersedes all burning permits, subject to extension. A violation of the order is a class B misdemeanor. Burning of campfires in licensed campgrounds is allowed.

Oswego County:
Under State of emergency with a burn ban until further notice (no open burning).

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Severe Thunderstorm 6PM

A broken line of thunderstorms is coming through Seneca and Cayuga Counties right now. One of the cells in this broken line has prompted a Severe Thunderstorm Warning. This part of the storm looks like it will head southeast towards Moravia within the next 45 minutes before heading into Northern Cortland County. The main threat from this storm appears to be some strong winds, as the storm attributes (the blue circles on the radar image below) are only indicating minimal hail. It looks like the worst will stay north of Groton.


(Click to enlarge)

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Historic Snow Storm: April 16, 2007

Boy...what a difference a year can make! We are in the midst of a stretch of absolutley lovely and warm weather with temperatures in the upper 60's today and 70s on the way.

However...April the 16th isn't always so nice. In fact, if you remember, it was just last year that winter came roaring back to life on the 16th, giving us the largest 24-hour snowfall that I have recorded (since Christmas 2002).

So lets take a moment to revisit this historic snow storm, which saw Groton get 18", Locke a national attention grabbing 23", and a couple of my videos posted on Accuweather.com senior meteorologist Henry Margusity's blog.

Looking back on my own blog, I first mentioned the possibility of a storm on April 11th. By the 13th everything looked like a go. I remember this day very clearly...it was a Friday. In school, I kept telling people we would have no school Monday or Tuesday from a snow storm. Of course few believed me at first...I mean snow days in mid-April? However, we did get snow days both days.

By 10AM Monday morning, the storm was in full force blasting us with heavy snow. Here is what it looked like Monday morning:




The snow was still coming down by the afternoon. One of the things that amazes me looking back at that post is the radar. Notice how most of the state was getting rain at this point...but we had enough cold air in the Finger Lakes to remain snow. I find that so ironic because we couldn't get a single storm to keep the cold air in all winter long this year...even in the dead of winter! In fact...this April storm gave us more snow than probably our two or three largest (non-lake effect) snow events this past year!

The snow was a very heavy snow and caused a good deal of problems with tree damage. Within a couple of days, the snow was gone, and I got a chance to go out into the woods and take some pictures of the tree damage that occurred, especially to pine trees.




I also like to point out the fact that just three weeks later, on May 9th, we hit 90 degrees.

If you want to read more about this storm, Accuweather's Jesse Ferrell also blogged about the storm today. Of course, he doesn't mention Groton (but he does mention Locke!) and takes a much more regional look at the storm, but it is a nice little post with an awesome map. Check it out.

Grotonweather.com Administrative Update:
I have been working on redesigning (again!) the grotonweather.com homepage. This is why I haven't gotten many of the links on the current homepage working again. I am very excited about the new design and a couple of new services I am going to be offering! I am having some new weather icons (not animated...sorry...) being made and will launch the new look once they are done. I am not sure when that will be though, so make sure you keep checking back!