Remember Goober of Gomer Pyle fame? Remember his favorite saying? Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!
That’s probably what he would have said had he been in Eagle Observer country Friday morning. In all caps: SURPRISE! SURPRISE! SURPRISE!
Yep, the snow was a surprise; well, almost anyway, since the tube temperature talkers had been predicting “a little” snow during the days which led up to the almost four inches of white stuff that fell before dawn last Friday.
At the local weather station site, almost four inches was measured atop the car in the driveway. Some melting had already occurred. The drugstore crowd was saying as much as five inches or more. Anyway, with the rainfall that preceded the snow, almost an inch of precip was in the rain gauge Friday morning.
I considered changing the name of the column from “Off the Cuff” to “Off the Charts,” like the music industry would say. But perhaps “Off the Calendar” might be more appropriate since it was the first snow ever reported in May in this neck of the woods. At least since the ice age.
Yep, it was a record. Who can remember such a snow this late in the spring?
I checked the local weather station records back to 1926 - that’s 87 years - and I found no record of May snow. However I did find a 12-incher occurred on April 14, 1933, as noted by local observer A.F. Stevens, who supplied the National Weather Service with reports for more than 30 years. On the front page of the Gravette News Herald, it was noted that it could have amounted to 15 or 20 inches of the white stuff.
More recently, a four inch snow occurred April 5, 1957, according to then observer Elson Schmidt. He noted on his report that strawberry and apple crops were heavily damaged. But no snow in May.
Of course this brings us to the question: How cold has the temperature been here in May?
Remember that old saying, “Thunder in February, Frost in May?” I’m not sure how true it is, but the records show there have been 27 years during the past 87 when there was frost in May, locally, some of which caused considerable crop damage.
The coldest May temperature was 27 degrees on May 1, 1963; the temp dropped to 30 degrees on May 26, 1926; and two years ago, on May 3, 2011, it was a sub-freezing 31 degrees.
Another weather topic that has been on everyone’s minds during the past year was the drought that blanketed much of mid-America. Northwest Arkansas was no exception. If I remember rightly, we were about 12 inches short of our annual 44 inch precipitation last year.
Rainfall during the first four months of this year has been above normal, with a total of 16.75 inches compared to the 12.99 which is average for the January-April period.
Perhaps now, we may be able to look forward to a more normal year. But considering the past 12-15months, who can say what is normal? The average five-month precipitation through May is 18.68 inches. With the almost inch of moisture last Friday night, it’ll take just a smidge for us to equal that by the end of May. Time will tell.
And speaking of time, this was the week I was going to write about that “nail” I mentioned several weeks ago. That has to wait. The pretty snow and the good moisture are more important than any nail. At least that may be so. Unless it’s holding up the ceiling. Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!
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Dodie Evans is the editor emeritus of the Westside Eagle Observer and may be contacted by email at [email protected].
Opinion, Pages 6 on 05/08/2013