
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, February 11, 1994                   TAG: 9402110076
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

CLIMATOLOGIST SAYS WEATHER IS PURE `SLEEZE'

Whether you're sick of it or not, this is going to be the Northeast's year of "sleeze," a term newly coined by Virginia state climatologist Pat Michaels to describe the sleet and freezing rain that has a tenacious grip on the region.

Ice continued to plague the Northeast on Thursday, pelting the mid-Atlantic region and leaving in its wake downed power lines, closed schools and businesses, and at least two dozen weather-related deaths.

For example, the Washington area's ice has resulted, in part, from the lowest temperatures in 12 years and the heaviest precipitation in seven years. But there is another explanation for the relentless ice storms of the winter of 1994.

The short of it is sleeze climatology.

There is enough evidence in historical weather data, Michaels said Thursday, to suggest that when the low-pressure systems that create storms begin to develop an early winter pattern - moving northward toward their inevitable collision with arctic air masses moving south - these patterns tend to persist for the rest of the season.

If the low-pressure system were moving offshore as it moved up the coast, Michaels said, the cold air mass being pushed south by the jet stream would remain deep enough to produce snow instead of freezing rain.

But this winter, for the first time in several years, the pattern has been different: The warm, moist Gulf of Mexico air has tracked slightly inland of the Atlantic coastline as it moves northward, resulting in freezing rain because of the depth of the warm air mass when it meets the cold front.

Freezing rain occurs when liquid drops fall through warm air onto a surface that is below freezing - the kind of shallow layer of cold that frequently is trapped against the Blue Ridge and other mountains on the western side of the Shenandoah Valley.

"So the pattern is formed, and the pattern is likely to stay. I see more sleeze time ahead," said Michaels. In fact, he said, the region has had plenty of freezing rain and sleet over the years, as evidenced by ancient trees in the Blue Ridge forest and other forests that have been naturally pruned by the ice storms and have left marks to prove it.

And there is more sleet and freezing rain in store for the entire Northeast, according to the National Weather Service.

The new precipitation was expected on the heels of a long winter storm, stretching from the Gulf Coast to New England, that closed schools and businesses Thursday as far south as Houston and left thousands of people in Arkansas without power.

Lake Superior, the largest of the Great Lakes, was completely covered by ice for the first time in 16 years.

In West Virginia, heavy rain caused the worst flooding in years, followed by ice and snow that interrupted power to thousands of customers.

An inch of ice sent motorists in Austin, Texas, literally into a spin, with almost 150 traffic accidents in the morning, prompting officials to declare a weather emergency.

In Dallas and Fort Worth, meteorologists reported 4 inches of slick glassy ice, and the shoulders of local freeways were full of cars parked askew and abandoned.

In New England, it snowed for nearly 48 hours and the storm left up to 2 feet of new snow.

by CNB