A Study of Major Winter Storms for Hickory and Raleigh, NC

**Updated 11/8/04**

I have attempted to compile a climatology for major snow storms for Hickory and Raleigh in North Carolina in order to determine the mean pattern and mean value for certain parameters for major winter storms that have effected both Hickory and Raleigh.

The process began by looking at major winter storms that have affected North Carolina per the National Weather Service in Raleigh’s research webpage NWS RAH in conjunction with NC State. This then led me to the Southeast Regional Climate Center home page SERCC where I obtained record snowfall amounts on certain dates for both the Hickory and Raleigh reporting stations. I then received snowfall data for RDU and Hickory since 1948 from the North Carolina State Climate Office. This led to a database of 20 snow events for Hickory and Raleigh.

Category 1: Snowstorms of approximately 7 inches or greater for Hickory area.
Category 2: Snowstorms of approximately 6 inches or greater for Raleigh area.

I then used the available information from the NWS/NC state web page for each case, archived surface observations and meteograms from the Plymouth State College website PSC Archive, archived NEXRAD data from NCDC, data from the NOAA central library US daily weather maps project website, and NCEP reanalysis data to determine the approximate precipitation time line of events for each case study.

There were 10 times given to each event to represent the approximate sequence of the events and determine a mean storm track and mean synoptic weather pattern for the events. 1. 12 hours before beginning of precip. 2. 6 hours before beginning of precip. 3. Beginning of precip. 4. Precip underway 5. Peak of precip. 6. Precip winding down 7. Ending of precip. 8. 6 hours after end of precip 9. 12 hours after end of precip. 10. 18 hours after end of precip. If the events were of short duration, then some repeats of times were used.

Then for each time, mean plots of different parameters were calculated. This was also done for several different areas: 1. Northern Hemisphere, 2. CONUS and southern Canada, 3. Southeast US, and 4. North Carolina. Using the NCEP reanalysis mean tool located at the website cited above. This gave me the mean values for important parameters.

Hickory Snows

Raleigh Snows


I will be fine tuning this research with time, and hopefully one day putting this on a better server. I know this is not a perfect study by any stretch. I would love to have more hourly obs data to perfect the time line for individual events and I also realize this is just an average for NC snow storms and individual events will not always have these same values. But I hope it can be a useful tool for winter forecasting in NC.