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Cardinal News did not yet exist in 2018. But a weather event that occurred five years ago this week was a rare bird for its widespread blanket of deep snow across almost all of what is now the red bird’s coverage area.
The December 9-10, 2018, snowstorm is the last storm that brought a foot or more of snow to the vast majority of the Southwest and Southside Virginia coverage area of Cardinal News.
For most locations in our region east of present-day Interstate 77, it was the earliest on the cold end of the calendar that a foot-plus snowstorm had occurred. It was also the most widespread coverage of foot-plus snow in our region that any winter storm had delivered since 1996 – foot-plus snows in January 1998, December 2009, February 2014 and January 2016 had wide coverage, but often left some areas in Southside or east of the Blue Ridge with lesser amounts.
Only the southwest fringe of Virginia had less than a foot with the December 2018 storm, and a few isolated other spots like Lynchburg that came in just barely under a foot (11.7 inches).
Since that snowy Sunday five years ago, a winter storm in late January 2021 and two in January 2022 have topped 6 inches in at least part of our region, but there really have been no others that have even come close to being a “big one.” The timeframe since the December 9-10, 2018, snowstorm has also included two winters, 2019-20 and 2022-23, that were snowless or nearly snowless for large sections of our region.
Historically, foot-plus snowstorms happen about twice a decade through the middle portion of our region, places like Roanoke and Lynchburg. They happen a bit more often, three or four a decade, to the west, and a little less often, once a decade to once every 20 years, moving east across Southside. The December 2018 snowstorm was the fourth foot-plus storm in a decade at Roanoke but the first in 22 years at Danville. The frequency was either running somewhat ahead or near the historic schedule across much of our region.
The 2018-19 winter, like the current one, was influenced by El Niño, or the irregularly recurring warm stripe of equatorial Pacific waters. It was not as strong as the present El Niño, but a subtropical branch of the jet stream proved plenty juicy for several wet storm systems throughout that winter, something we may be just starting to see hints of developing presently.
Diametrically opposite of what some long-range forecast models are suggesting could happen this winter, the season started with parked, deep cold air and then turned mild from the holidays through much of January and February. Three weeks before the Dec. 9-10 snowstorm, elevations near and above 1,500 feet along and west of the Blue Ridge experienced a historically early mid-November significant ice storm, with thousands losing power.
With so much early snow and ice, the 2018-19 winter seemed likely to be an epic one, but there wasn’t much more to it after Dec. 9-10. Storm systems on Jan. 12-13 and February 20 brought snow changing to mix changing to ice or cold rain to parts of our region, but snow totals for the season ended up mostly coming from the Dec. 9-10 event.
· Danville’s 15.2 inches on Dec. 9-10 was the entire measured accumulation for the 2018-19 winter.
· Martinsville gained only two-tenths of an inch, from 15 with the early snowstorm to 15.2 for the season.
· Abingdon got just 1 more inch for the season after the early 12, totaling 13.
· Roanoke measured 15.2 on Dec. 9-10 but never quite made 20 inches for the season, topping out at 19.6.
· Wytheville managed almost 6 inches after the early December 17.4 inch dump for 23 total.
· Appomattox got almost 5 more after the early 13.4 for 18.3 total.
Farther north and west, some locations got a little more in the later storms.
· Blacksburg got 13.7 in early December and ended with 22.2.
· Lexington measured 14.8 in the early storm and ended up with 25.
· Burke’s Garden went from 15 in the first storm to 26.8 for the season – not really as much as would typically be expected.
· Lynchburg, mentioned earlier for its odd sub-foot total of 11.7 on Dec. 9-10, almost doubled the season total with later storms, reaching 21 total.
You may remember the buildup to the storm in the first full week of December 2018. Snow was in the forecast for the coming weekend for many days. But about three days before the event, many forecast models started taking the snow band farther and farther south, to the point that by the Friday before the Sunday storm, it looked like areas north of U.S. 460 might miss the snow. Excited snow fans began to panic, and some skeptics prematurely started panning weather commentators for overhyping the storm.
At that point, a very similarly structured storm in late January 2010, in the middle of what was the most epic winter for snowfall of the 21st century to date in much of our region, was quite instructive. Just as happened with forecast guidance in the last 36-48 hours before that regional 6-12-inch event, each successive run of the forecast models began bringing the heavy snow farther and farther north, just as most of us looking at weather maps with our own eyeballs and previous experience were expecting.
The digital prognostication never quite caught up with reality, and the foot-deep snow eventually spread all the way to Interstate 64, and the northern edge of the hard-edged snow band got above Harrisonburg, much farther north than the latest forecast models were indicating. The 2018 storm didn’t quite reach Washington, D.C., which got half a foot in the 2010 storm when the nation’s capital looked like it would be missed a day or two before.
The 2010 and 2018 storms were both, broadly speaking, what we call “overrunning” events, when a medium-strength low-pressure system moving eastward along the Gulf Coast lifts abundant moisture up and over a cold air mass that is wedged southward against the Appalachians by strong high pressure to the north. That high pressure, and the confluence of wind flow aloft, put a barrier on just how far north the moisture field could expand, creating a hard northern edge to the snowfall.
The 2018 storm did take a northeast turn over the Southeast U.S. to just off the shore of North Carolina, causing snow to linger in some areas near the North Carolina border past sunrise into the following morning of Dec. 10. That track was a little more like the “Miller A” snowstorms that ride up the East Coast and comprise most of our region’s foot-plus dumps historically. But, on the whole, it was more in the overrunning category, and an unprecedentedly large snowstorm of that type for our region.
The subject of how winters are changing in our region with a warming global climate is more complex than it might seem, but in general, it does appear that winters with very little snow are becoming somewhat more frequent even as the frequency of especially large snowstorms is not changing much, perhaps even becoming a bit more common. Some Eastern cities to the north of us have noted patterns of more frequent large snowstorms but less annual average snowfall.
This may seem paradoxical, but temperatures averaging somewhat warmer over time would tend to cause it to rain rather than snow more often in borderline temperature events and weaker storm systems that have caused a few inches of snow in the past, while more infrequent larger storms with sharper temperature gradients, deeper upper-level support and potentially more moisture inflow would be less affected in that manner, perhaps sometimes enhanced.
El Niño patterns are already known for “feast or famine” winter snow in our region that is often dependent on one to three larger storms rather than frequent light to moderate snows. Could the overall climate be moving more toward fewer but bigger snowstorms, like the one five years ago?
Be that yay or nay, it would seem that, in a sense, our region, or at least some part of it, is about “due” for a winter storm of similar impact to that five years ago. Cardinal News, approaching 2½ years old, with my weather coverage having moved over from nearly two decades at The Roanoke Times only a little more than a year ago, hasn’t yet had the challenge of covering such a large winter storm in our region. We’ll be ready when it happens.
More active but mostly mild weather ahead
Snow showers scattered over the mountains behind a cold front on this Wednesday morning. Some of you in higher elevations, west of I-77 or near the West Virginia line may have seen some light accumulation.
This wintry interlude will be brief, with milder temperatures near or above 60 in much of Southwest and Southside Virginia by the weekend. By Sunday, a still much-needed soaking rain will occur ahead of a cold front with a strong low-pressure to the north pulling moisture from the Gulf of Mexico ahead of the front. There may be at least some risk of storms with gusty winds, especially toward Southside, but more so in states to our south.
Though early next week will turn colder again, the weather pattern looking toward mid-month generally favors milder temperatures flowing in from strong Pacific flow, with occasional cold punches. Wet storm systems appear to be becoming more frequent as we would expect in an El Niño-influenced pattern. It’s still possible the cold and the wet could catch up for something wintry even in an overall milder pattern.
We’ll revisit later in the month whether the pattern flips to something colder after Christmas.
Journalist Kevin Myatt has been writing about weather for 20 years. His weekly column, appearing on Wednesdays, is sponsored by Oakey’s, a family-run, locally owned funeral home with locations throughout the Roanoke Valley.
