Kelly, North Carolina

... Twentieth anniversary of a historic coastal snowstorm...

20 years ago tonight there was 8 inches of snow on the ground in
Wilmington... and heavy snow was falling across most of the coastal
Carolinas. The single largest snowstorm in coastal Carolina history
was ongoing and snowfall would eventually total 15.3 inches at the
Wilmington international Airport. The last of the big Arctic blasts
of the 1980s had dropped temperatures into the single digits across
much of the southeastern states. Low pressure developed along the
Arctic front well offshore and moisture was being thrown back into
the cold airmass along the coast.

The highest snowfall totals extended from Conway SC (13.5 inches)...
Myrtle Beach (14.0 inches) and Loris (14.5 inches) into western
Brunswick County (longwood: 19.5 inches)... through Wilmington (15.3
inches) to Castle Hayne (17.5 inches)... then on into Jacksonville
and Morehead City (16 inches). The snow accumulation gradient on the
west side of the storm was very tight: Marion reported 8 inches...
Florence had 4.3 inches... with amounts west of I-95 generally in the
trace-to-2 inch range. Despite bitterly cold temperatures snow was
not observed at all west of a line from Columbia SC to Rockingham
and Southern Pines.

With such extreme snowfall accumulations the disruption to travel
and basic services was similar to that experienced after a major
hurricane. The Wilmington Airport recorded 3 or more inches of snow
on the ground for eight consecutive days during and after the
storm... a record so unmatched by anything else in the climate
database that it may remain unbroken for hundreds of years to come.

On the morning of December 25 1989 with 13 inches of snow still on
the ground the Wilmington Airport recorded its all time record low
temperature... zero degrees... a full 5 degrees below the next coldest
temperature in the 135 years of Wilmington climate history. Other
locations in the eastern Carolinas also set their all-time lowest
temperatures that morning including New Bern (-4 degrees)...
Whiteville (-2 degrees)... Marion (0 degrees)... Kingstree (4
degrees)... and Conway (8 degrees). These beat out the previous
all-time record low temperatures set just a few years earlier during
the historic Arctic blast of January 1985.