Near whiteout snowfall was visible briefly Tuesday outside The Times-Gazette offices.
Jeff Gilliland | The Times-Gazette
A Tuesday snow dusting seemed to herald the coming Christmas holiday as it rolled in quickly and left just as soon as it seemed to appear, with around a half-inch reported.
James Gibson, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service (NWS) in Wilmington, said the system that came in was what the NWS would call a cyclonic flow with northwest wind from the lakes.
“So we had a lake effect enhancement on top of a low pressure moving in,” Gibson said. “If you noticed, it was started before the colder it got here, so it actually started off as a rain and then it switched over to snow because the temperatures. And what was happening is, it was kind of like, if this was summertime, those would been thunderstorms. We basically had three reports of thunderstorms. None in the Hillsboro area … So, we had a burst of snow and what happens with these bursts of snow is the winds pick up and the visibility changes rapidly. So that’s why you’re looking at outside and you’re like, oh, it’s a nice day and then all of a sudden the snow starts coming in and you could barely see anything for a mile.
“So, when that happens, especially on roadways, it doesn’t give people time enough to stop or slow down. And that’s, I mean, why we have some accidents in the winter. So, you’ve probably heard the word squall. So, technically we didn’t issue any squall warnings yesterday because they were just snow showers but we had snow showers. As far as accumulation, there was hardly any.”
He said that because the ground temperatures were above freezing, a lot of the snow was melting quickly. Due to that, he said that if someone didn’t catch it as it happened and then waited an hour, you would have said it didn’t snow at all.
In terms of other possibilities of snowfall in the coming days, that doesn’t seem likely at all.
“It’s a zero percent chance of a white Christmas,” Gibson said. “… We’re looking at a 50 percent chance of rain on Christmas Day, but the high is gonna be 57 degrees.”
He said the NWS knew two weeks ago that the chances of a white Christmas were “pretty much zero” because they knew that the pressure would build and cause a warm surge through the Midwest.
He said the county’s next chance of rain would be Friday night and then after that Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
Reach Jacob Clary at 937-402-2570.
