The hurricane season for the Atlantic basin draws to a close this weekend, ending on Sunday.  NOAA says it was another active season, featuring:

• 16 named storms, of which 8 were hurricanes (5 of those reaching major hurricane status -- Category 3 strength)
• the first time six consecutive named storms made landfall in the US (Dolly, Edouard, Fay, Gustav, Hanna, and Ike)
• the first time three major hurricanes struck Cuba (Gustav, Ike, and Paloma)
• first season to have a major hurricane form in five consecutive months (July, Bertha; August, Gustav; September, Ike; October, Omar; November, Paloma)

The official press release from NOAA is a nice recap of the season.

Sounds like the start of an old Andy Rooney piece on "60 Minutes," but what I'm actually referring to is if you ever wondered what the coldest or warmest or rainiest holiday was, for example how hot have we been on Thanksgiving or how cold on New Year's Day, or what's the most rain that's fallen on Easter?

We get a question like that from time to time, and existing climate resources make it fairly simple to answer those questions for holidays that are date-specific, like Christmas or July 4th, but it's always been a much more troublesome or tedious process when it's a variable holiday like Thanksgiving or Labor Day. Well, not as much now, thanks to our friends at the State Climate Office of North Carolina, who answered such a question that I posed to them by developing a really neat online tool that can comb through years of data and check all the appropriate weather observations for most any holiday, and return a table that shows results for an abundance of sites around...

Did you know that we are currently in the midst of our longest streak of below normal temperatures all year? Yes, unfortunately for us cold weather lovers, 2008 has been yet another disappointing year!

There may still be hope.  We have now experienced 9 consecutive days below normal, dating back to November 16. Prior to that period, the longest streak of sub-normal temperatures was 6, and that happened on 3 different occasions.

Just for fun, I arbitrarily defined a "streak" as 5 or more consecutive days of either above or below normal temperatures. Using this definition, we have experienced 14 warm streaks and 8 cold streaks this year. But if you dig a little deeper, the score is not even that close. Those 8 cold streaks account for 47 days out of the entire year, while the warm streaks account for a whopping 119 days!

Here is a list of those streaks:

Warm Streaks

• Jan 6-14 (9 days)
• Feb...

Last week turned out to be fairly eventful in terms of the weather, in a more benign way, in the wake of the severe weather that occur ed on Saturday. Strong cooling behind the frontal system and upper level trough axis that helped trigger tornadic storms was reinforced a time or two through the week as cold fronts passed through followed in some cases by very steep low level lapse rates (decrease of temperatures with height above the ground) and very col pockets of air aloft. This led to a midday and afternoon round of scattered flurries and snow showers on Tuesday (Nov 18th), and then another strong upper disturbance made it's way across the area on Friday morning (the 21st), this one with a band of snow and in some warmer spots rain.

While the snow on Tuesday was fairly early in the season for our area, it didn't claim any records, as a trace was recorded at the RDU airport, and we have seen a trace of snow there as early as November 2nd back in 1954. Our earliest measurable...

It's a little difficult to add much to the coverage you've probably seen on the supercell thunderstorms and associated tornadoes that tracked northeast early on Saturday, mainly along the I-95 corridor over eastern parts of our viewing area, but I thought I would provide at least a little amplification on the warnings involved, some climatological perspective and a few links where you can pursue additional information.

To begin with, I would note that while many tornadoes in North Carolina are very weak and have very brief lifetimes and short touchdown tracks, this event involved a couple of supercell circulations that produced some downburst wind damage and also multiple tornado tracks that ranged in intensity from EF0 to EF3 on the Enhanced Fujita scale. While many of the tornadoes that occur in our state allow for relatively little warning, these cells did produce rather deep mesocyclone circulations that could be identified and tracked on a relatively continuous basis using...