Jason Godwin's Weather (and Other Stuff) Blog

With snow in the forecast for North Texas, I figured it was a good week to feature a snow photo. This photo was taken on January 29, 2010, and shows the Oklahoma Memorial Union on the University of Oklahoma campus in the middle of a heavy snow event. In fact, this event is the largest single-day snowfall I have ever personally experienced. Growing up on the Gulf Coast, snow was quite rare, let alone accumulating snow. This occurred during my second semester at OU, so it was quite a treat for a Louisiana boy. Data from the NWS shows that Norman received 7-9 inches of snow, depending on which station you use. Either way, over half a foot of snow! In fact, Norman recorded the highest amount in the state for this particular day, though most of the Oklahoma City Metropolitan Area picked up at least six inches of snow. I'm doubtful the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex will see something like this on Tuesday night/Wednesday (unless you believe a few outlier runs of the GFS), but I do th...

For this week's Photo of the Week (actually taken by my dad), I went into the archives again and found a picture of a beautiful sunset. But not just any sunset. This was the sunset the night before Hurricane Katrina's historic landfall on the Louisiana coast. Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29, 2005 (when I was a sophomore in high school), bringing catastrophic damage to southeast Louisiana and southern Mississippi, and in particular, in the Greater New Orleans area. This photo was taken from Lafayette, Louisiana (my hometown). The effects in Lafayette were actually fairly minimal, but Lafayette would experience moderate impacts from Hurricane Rita about a month later. I was already interested in weather around this time, but Katrina, along with the rest of the historic 2005 hurricane season, would help solidify my lifelong interest in meteorology.