Jared W. Smith

Today was remarkable in Charleston for another reason than a historic day in America; depending on where you were, it snowed! It will continue to do so, too, throughout the evening and into tonight. Here’s a radar still from 6:00 PM, showing where snow has been reported (lots of places!)

NWS Charleston has noted accumulations of up to a quarter inch in Colleton County, with a trace of snow throughout the Charleston metro. I, personally, have seen a few flakes but nothing really out of the ordinary just yet. I’ll take video if/when I do. However, it seems as if the heaviest snow is remaining to the south and west; no telling if it will creep a bit more northeast. NWS keeps us in a 60% chance of snow and a Winter Weather Advisory until 11 PM, so it’s likely that we’ll see a bit more snow in the area before it’s over. Major accumulations aren’t expected; rather, the threat will be from puddles where it rained/sleeted earlier this morning refreezing overnight, as temperatures are expected to dip into the lower 20s inland (mid-20s near the coast). Wind chills will be somewhere in the low teens again. (It’s clear that Old Man Winter is reasserting himself after that absolutely balmy December.) Be very careful driving tomorrow morning in rush hour!

This morning I started the #omgsnow09 hashtag for Twitter users to make snow reports; there have been a lot of reports in North Charleston, and a couple in Summerville as well. Keep an eye on that one throughout the evening as more reports roll in. Also, watch @chswx on Twitter for updates as needed.

I’ve got a pretty rudimentary radar page going so you can monitor today’s impending storms. No, it’s not AJAXy and uses a low-tech meta refresh to reload every five minutes…but hey, I could whip it up in 10 minutes at a terminal. :) I might add some stuff on my lunch break later, so keep an eye out.

Perhaps the only thing that could have pulled me away from my sweet-as-all-hell personal street level Doppler radar setup (more gushing on this in a second) would have been a Lowcountry Blogs meetup. It was great to meet up with everyone again — within walking distance, to boot. It was my first time ever going to Little Thai Too on King Street and the food was excellent. Great, great choice. :) It was, as always, a great time (this time devoid of a heartbreaking Charger playoff loss). As usual, our resident award-winning photo blogger Joan is first with photos. (I took the second picture on that page, by the way — and Joan has the most hardcore camera I think I’ve ever tried. I struggled to find the shutter button amongst the lot of ‘em! :))

This was a good weekend, overall:

Friday was absolutely nutty with rescuing a web server and other things, so I felt as if the time was right to brush back up with some Linux server administration. To this end, I brought the rack-mount machine formerly known as briscoe (now known as sassything — don’t ask) back online (over a few glasses of Yellow Tail chardonnay). It’s only visible behind my firewall, though, and really, really needs to be hardened up a bit, if only for my own sanity.

Saturday began with ambitions of getting some school work done ahead of time. That didn’t work out too well. I did run up to my parents’ and took care of a few loose ends with my taxes, though. Then, I went to my co-worker buddy Greg’s house for his birthday (which was today). I had some badass ribs up there. Good times.

Today started in the afternoon with a text message about the threat of severe weather for today. I then proceeded to trick out my copy of GRLevel3 with all sorts of sweet stuff and basically watched thunderstorms roll through until the meetup. GRLevel3 is effing awesome. It takes Level III NEXRAD data from the National Weather Service and overlays it over a basemap, does animations, all sorts of stuff. The best part of this program is that one can take pretty much any GIS data you want and import it into the program. I was able to download a GIS shape file with roads in various counties in South Carolina, import those roads…and bam! Instant street-level Doppler, just like that. It’s freaking awesome. It costs $80 (I’m running the trial right now) and considering its power, it seems to be well worth the money. It does a great job monitoring warnings, shows a graphical view of warned areas (and whittles them away as the NWS issues warning updates), points out hail-producing and rotating thunderstorms, and gives you a bajillion different NEXRAD products for analysis. For a weather nerd like myself, this is pretty close to heaven on earth.

Mother Nature obviously wanted to make sure I got a thorough evaluation of the product today, as those storms that marched through were no slouches (though we only got a couple claps of thunder downtown). There were some tornado warnings earlier in the southern tip of SC (Jasper County, etc.), and I was able to pick up where the rotation was occurring on the radar. I highly recommend this for those with an interest in storm tracking (a lot of chasers like this software), because the ability to import GIS data makes this tool about as flexible as an Olympic gymnast.

And so Monday begins…one more wild and crazy week before Spring Break. I’ll make it.