Page 1 of 1

Need 50 year old storm info. Anybody?

Posted: Mon Apr 25, 2011 7:12 pm
by Treefrog
On January 14, 1961, a winter gail collapsed Texas Tower Four, an Air Force Radar Station, 70 miles at sea, east of Boston.
On January 20, the surprising intensity of a blizzard almost stopped JFK's inauguration in Washington.
On January 23, a B-52 crashed at Goldsboro, NC. Supposedly, weather was supposedly not a factor, but a front was moving west to east at exactly that time. Snow and ice stopped recovery efforts and the state was hit by a fierce winter storm for days after.

This was before weather satellites. Can anybody tie the weather of these three events together?

Need some help.
Thanks

Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2011 8:43 pm
by supercane
Not exactly sure what you're asking for here. You can look at old daily weather from the NOAA Central Library
U.S. Daily Weather Maps Project at http://docs.lib.noaa.gov/rescue/dwm/data_rescue_daily_weather_maps.html to investigate whether the upper air patterns were similar during the three events. As an alternative, you can try to use data from the NCAR reanalysis. While it is possible to load the data raw, for your purposes it may be easier to use one of the many plotters available. Here is a link to Christopher Godfrey's NCAR renalysis plotter. Below is the 500-mb geopotential height and MSLP plotted from this site for 20 Jan 1961 at 12Z:
Image
which shows a nor'easter at the surface and a broad east coast trough likely responsible for the poor inaugural weather.
Hope this helps.

Re: Need 50 year old storm info. Anybody?

Posted: Wed Sep 07, 2011 10:39 pm
by Ptarmigan
Try these.

20th Century Reanalysis Daily Composites
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/cgi-bin/da ... .day.v2.pl

20th Century Reanalysis Monthly Composites
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/cgi-bin/da ... 0thc.v2.pl