Record rainfall here could have meant a very white Thanksgiving

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

If your yard is still waterlogged from all the rain that fell during the day Sunday into Monday morning, just be glad that record rainfall wasn't snow.

The period from 7 a.m. Sunday through 7 a.m. Monday produced 2.23 inches of rain in Greencastle, according to local weather observer Diana Foust.

That's a quarter-inch more than Indianapolis received as the 1.98 inches recorded by the National Weather Service Indianapolis office set a record for Nov. 23, breaking a mark that had stood since 1873.

The soggy totals also made it the wettest day of 2014, surpassing May 21 when 1.87 inches of spring rain fell, meteorologist Tara Dudzik of the NWS Indianapolis

office said.

The silver lining, of course, was that temperatures Sunday and Monday were warm enough to keep it all rain instead of it falling as snow.

Using the standard inch-of-rain-equals-10 inches-of-snow formula, the result could have been Buffalo-like on Sunday and Monday.

Depending on just how cold temperatures might have been, the result could have been up to 20 inches of snow.

The rule-of-thumb formula notes that if the temperature is between 12 and 24 degrees, an inch of rain generally yields 10 inches of snow. If the temperature is 24-28 degrees, snow is usually a bit more dense and typically an inch of rain would translate into seven inches of snow.

When temperatures are 28-31 degrees, the snow is generally wet and dense and some melting takes place on contact. Those circumstances can result in an inch of rain yielding five inches of snow.

Regardless, the recent 24-hour period produced more than half of the typical November rainfall (3.7 inches on average). In fact, the monthly rainfall record for November is 4.3 inches set in 1881.

And since we've brought it up, the average monthly snowfall for November in central Indiana is only three-quarters of an inch (.73 inch to be exact).

A typical winter, lest we forget, results in 26.7 inches of snow. The record is 58.2 inches of snowfall set 1981-82, while 2013-14 produced 55.7 inches to rank third all-time in snowfall in central Indiana.

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