November snow
Snow already? First flakes possible early Friday; early, but not all that unusual.
The computers and the meteorologists are in rock-solid accord that temperatures during the next several days are going to come in at 10 to 15 degrees below normal.
And just to add a dash of drama, they see a chance for some wet snow during the early-morning hours on Friday.
That might seem punitively early, and it probably is.
But by our count snowflakes have been sighted officially in Philadelphia during the first two weeks of November in 42 of the 130 years in the period of record.
In most cases, a "trace" was reported in Philadelphia officially, and as one might expect, actual measureable snow is rarer. We found it in only seven instances.
Most emphatically, 8.8 inches were record on Nov. 6-7, 1953. In 1987, Philly missed out on the Veterans Day storm that buried the Washington area, but the airport did weigh in with 1.3 inches.
Getting through the entire month without at least flake-sightings is unusual. We could find only 27 Novembers in which that failed to happen – again, in most instances those were traces. (Snow has to accumulate at least 0.01 inches to qualify as measureable.)
One notable exception was the 4.6 inches on Thanksgiving Eve, Nov. 22, in 1989.
A storm due to effect the region early next week is getting some buzz as a possible rain-and-snow maker, but drawing from lessons of years past, we remind our readers that is only Wednesday.
