The Great Central Plains Icestorm

[Alan Dunkin]

Check out the Extreme Instability guy's pics from the storm. I don't think I've quite seen an icestorm like this one, especially one where there's no lake effect, bodies of water or anything else. Just crazyness - ice is 2-inches thick on stop sign for God's sake. Electrical towers all toppled over like some weird movie. The word "disaster" is starting to be used, and I can see why. Holy crap.

http://www.extremeinstability.com/2006.htm

Scroll to the bottom.

--- Alan

[mouselock]

I was going to post that I remember being in Kansas City for an impressive ice storm in the late 80s/early 90s.. (90,91 maybe?) but after looking at those pictures it's clear the one I was in had nothing on those We had maybe 1/2" of ice (which is enough to keep you inside for days and make a mess of local travel and services), but jesus. Anyone know exactly what was up with the weather that it deposited ice that thick? It's really hard for it to be that cold and yet that much water to end up as ice instead of snow. Just a constant near-freezing light rain for the better part of the day or something?

[Ben Sones]

I've never seen anything quite like that. The pics on the last page of the steel high tension electrical towers crumpled like toys was pretty amazing. Here's a closer view (http://www.underthemeso.com/gallery2/misc/2006dec30/icestorm/1__DSC7163.jpg.html), from one of the sites that he links.

[Ephraim]

The Eastern Ontario / Quebec Ice Storm of 1998 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_ice_storm_of_1998) I witnessed firsthand makes that look pretty familiar. Though I do get the feeling our ice storm was worse because it affected two major urban areas (Ottawa and Montreal) pretty severely.

Some pics (http://tarotcanada.tripod.com/index-Ice.html) here.

[Phil_Stein]

The ice storm made for some great sledding in St. Louis. A base coat of ice with some powder on top = fast!

[Nick Walter]

I was going to post that I remember being in Kansas City for an impressive ice storm in the late 80s/early 90s.. (90,91 maybe?) but after looking at those pictures it's clear the one I was in had nothing on those We had maybe 1/2" of ice (which is enough to keep you inside for days and make a mess of local travel and services), but jesus. Anyone know exactly what was up with the weather that it deposited ice that thick? It's really hard for it to be that cold and yet that much water to end up as ice instead of snow. Just a constant near-freezing light rain for the better part of the day or something?

Our local Nebraska papers have been all over this. I live in Nebraska, but thankfully far enough east to have missed out on this mess. Apparently what happened was that a blizzard moved east off the Rockies and hit a region with high level air a few degrees below freezing and ground and ground level air a few degrees above freezing. Just the perfect balance. So all the snow fell and melted, and then enough of it fell to drop the ground/air temperature and WHAM everything froze. Apparently the ground and low level air temps seesawed back and forth several times over the freezing point so there were subsequent melt/freeze cycles all in the same day.