It’s been snowing or sleeting in Bucks County, PA since noon on Tuesday. The snow that was falling yesterday afternoon and evening didn’t amount to very much. This seemed really odd to me because the weather has been below freezing for at least the last two weeks. We’ve also got frozen lakes and ponds in New Jersey and Eastern Pennsylvania which is always the hallmark of an extended streak of cold weather.
We awoke today to the whispery sound of heavy sleet. Unlike most sleet events in this area, however, there was no thick ice on cement and asphalt surfaces. Instead we had very fine ice pellets everywhere. I later learned that this occurred because the air temperature at ground level was well below freezing while the upper atmosphere was quite a bit warmer. This is the opposite condition from the typical sleet or freezing rain event in this part of the country.
I shoveled a three-inch deep mixture of snow and fine ice pellets from the sidewalk and driveway in front of The Home Office. In our typical mixed precipitation events around here, this would be back-breaking work because wet snow would fall first followed by sleet, followed by an icy rain. Today we had very fine, light snow and ice mixed together. All of it was moved quite easily.
Kathleen drove our new Honda Accord SE to work with no real problems, but a lot of slow going. She told me that the road crews (known as PennDOT around here) didn’t plow the roads the way they normally do. Instead, they put down a mixture of road salt and fine sand or gravel to increase traction. According to a news report she heard on the radio, PennDOT was concerned that plowing would have caused conditions to deteriorate because the roads would be more suceptible to icing.
They might have been right about that. I think the sidewalk in front of my house is a bit more slippery now than it was before I started shoveling.