By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM

It has been the winter of the big snows, from China, the Middle East, Greece, Canada and in the United States from the Pacific Northwest to Colorado and across the plains and upper Midwest to Great Lakes and northern New England. All time records were broken in places. Some of the places that missed out on many of the storms was hard hit this weekend. In a stripe from Mississippi to Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio, a storm deposited up to 20 inches of snow, the most in Ohio near Columbus. There the storm, which rolled in Friday, dumped 20.4 inches of snow, breaking the city’s previous record of 15.3 inches set in February 1910, the weather service said. During the weekend, blizzard conditions raged.  See the story By Kathy Lynn Gray, Blizzard of 2008 in the Columbus Dispatch here.

Photo from TV 10, WBNS, Central Ohio’s News Leader

In Indiana, 14 inches of snow fell in Milan, which is about 60 miles southeast of Indianapolis, said the weather service said. It was a continuation of the storm that on Friday piled up snow a foot deep in Arkansas and blacked out thousands of homes and businesses from that state to the Great Lakes. Louisville, Ky., and parts of Tennessee got up to a foot, while northern Mississippi got 5 to 7 inches of snow, the weather service said.

Further east the storm brought flooding rains and strong winds that downed trees and power lines to eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey and flooding rains to New York and New England. More storms can be seen on the computer models that may brings snows further east. Since the coldest water with this La Nina in the tropical Pacific has shifted more towards the central Pacific from the eastern Pacific, storms have tended to track inland and bring more rain to the northeast. Blocking though is developing in the Atlantic and polar regions and this should force future storms to track or redevelop further south and bring some late snows to the east the next few weeks.