ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, February 17, 1996 TAG: 9602190034
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
NOTE: Above
IF YOU BELIEVE we're going to get a 3 1/2-foot snowfall before the winter's over, we have some nice low-lying land in Florida to sell you.
Heard the one about the 40-inch snowfall coming?
It's all the talk around Western Virginia, and the word is that a farmers' almanac forecast it.
If anybody has that almanac, please call this reporter at 981-3358 and leave a message.
We can't find the source of this ominous news. We contacted six almanacs across the country and turned up no 40-inch prediction.
"That always pops up this time of the winter," a skeptical Gerald Lestz, editor of Baer's Almanac in Lancaster, Pa., since 1948, said of the rumor. "It's one of those mythical almanacs no one can find."
The National Weather Service heard it and hasn't seen it in an almanac either. "You think we'd be caught dead with one of them in our office?'' said Dave Keller in the service's Blacksburg office.
The closest thing, number-wise, was a total winter snowfall prediction of 45 inches from J. Gruber's Hagers-Town Town and Country Almanack in Hagerstown, Md. (Their snowfall is about double that already this winter.)
Forty inches would be some amount of flakes, though. "A single snowfall of 40 inches would be at least a century record, if not a two-century record," said Jerry Stenger with the state climatologist's office in Charlottesville.
With 73.6 inches of snow so far this winter, Blacksburg already has far exceeded its record of 53.6 inches in the winter of 1987-88. National Weather Service meteorologist Modesto Vasquez in Blacksburg said weather has been recorded officially there only since 1952. Six inches of snow fell in some parts of that town Thursday and Friday.
Roanoke had 4.9 inches of fluffy snow - hardly enough to keep most motorists at home, except those who drive school buses.
That brings Roanoke's seasonal total to 55.7 inches, making this the third-snowiest winter since the government began officially observing Roanoke's weather in 1901.
With another snow measuring three-tenths of an inch, this winter's total will reach 56 inches, the amount that fell in 1986-87, Roanoke's second-snowiest winter.
So far this season, the weather service has logged snow on 11 days. The dates and amounts were:
* Nov. 13 - 0.4 inch
* Dec. 7 - 10 inches
* Jan. 6 - 10.9 inches
* Jan. 7 - 14 inches
* Jan. 11 - 0.1 inch
* Jan. 12 - 2.9 inches
* Jan. 29 - 0.3 inch
* Feb. 2 - 11.3 inches
* Feb. 3 - 0.9 inch
* Feb. 15 - 0.3 inch
* Feb. 16 - 4.6 inches.
Last winter, Roanoke experienced snow on 14 days.
LENGTH: Medium: 69 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. ROGER HART/Staff. Is it dry yet? The drastic changeby CNBin temperature caught a household's laundry still on the line in
Salem. color. 2. WAYNE DEEL/Staff. A sure sign of spring - robins.
These three find themselves hunting for food between the snow piles
in South Roanoke. Graphic: Map by staff: How this winter's snow
compares. color.