Heres what environment canada says: http://www.weatheroffice.gc.ca/saisons/image_e.html?img=sfe1t_s This is what I use, and the almanac, but concidering the messed up weather patterns and warming trend over the last 30 years, the almanac is becoming less reliable in my experience

Suzie, You never know, she might get a thundersnow storm. We've had a lot of them in recent years. I grew up in Texas just about 80 or 85 miles south of where we now live in Oklahoma, but I'd never even heard of thundersnow until we moved here. I won't say we have thundersnow here at our house every year that snow falls, but probably about every other year. We had it last year, and we've already had it this year. Jim Cantore was very entertaining the other night. I'm sure a lot of that is part of the "show" he puts on for the camera, but I also think he was shocked to see thundersnow that far north. The other weather phenomenon we have here that I don't remember having in Texas is derecho winds. The first one we experienced here came during the night with 60 mph winds and hit the house so suddenly and so hard while we were sleeping that we thought a semi-truck or an airplane had hit the house. I also had about 20 flats of plants on the screened-in porch (so it must have been April) and we had to run out and bring them all into the house because the temperature plunged probably 30 degrees in 10 minutes when the derecho wind hit the house. I think we've experienced 3 or 4 severe derecho wind storms at our house since then. The one I remember best, the local met on the TV news at noon told us it was coming and told us if we went outside 5 or 10 minutes before it was due to hit our area, we'd hear it coming like a "mighty rush of wind". Of course, Tim and I went outside 10 minutes before it was s supposed to hit and went down to the road so we'd have a clear view of it coming by looking up the roadway (too many trees around our house). Sure enough, a few minutes later it came roaring towards us like a freight train (we could hear it for a minute or more before we could see the blowing of the vegetation begin) and we went from clear skies to dark grey ones in about a minute as the wind blew through and the temperatures plunged. The other one I remember was a severe derecho squall line with multiple bow echoes accompanied by tons of lightning. This time, the TV met kept cutting into regular programming to warn that anyone working outside needed to get inside by a certain time. Our barn-style detached garage was being built then, and the buys working on it were welding steel beams together. I talked with them about the weather and convinced them to heed the warnings, get down off the structure, put up all their tools and head home. They literally were driving down the driveway when the derecho hit here and the first raindrops started falling, and we sure did have lightning! I was glad they weren't up on that metal framing when it hit. You've got to admit, Oklahoma's weather is never, ever dull. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Facts About Derecho Windstorms

At about 5:45 am every day, I go outside in my bathrobe and "check" the weather. Red sky in the morning, sailor take warning and I take my umbrella with me when I leave the house at 6:30. Red sky at night, nice sky in the morning, sailor's delight, no umbrella. If it's just a little brisk at 5:45, I wear a sweater or light jacket because it'll warm up by the time I come home and I'll be carrying whatever I've worn. If it's really cold, heavy coat and other gear - yes, I lived in the TC so I also know downright bitter cold. In the winter, I always wear some type of shoe/boot that can withstand snow. In my normal daily routine, as long as I don't get drenched with rain, I don't care too much about what the weather is. I have hairspray at work. If I'm going out of town for some number of days, I google the newspaper of my destination city and check what's going to be happening. Because there's not a darned thing I can do to affect the weather, I don't both too much about it.

Jennifer, I'm glad you got rain. I know that you needed it. I was looking at our tomato plants in pots around dinner time last night and thinking they needed water. Since heavy rainfall was in our forecast, I didn't water them but promised the plants I'd water them Saturday morning if the forecasted Friday rain missed us. It didn't miss us, so I won't have to water today....or for another week....or month. Larry, Water coming into the house? Wow. That's not good. I hope you find the source and can stop it from coming in. In terms of weather, we had it all last night and to a lesser extent it continues this morning, just without the wicked wind. There's been a ton of rainfall, thunder and lightning, wind gusting into the 60s, etc. The storms have been widespread but patchy, so some folks have more rain, and more damage, than others. We have roofs torn off buildings, trees down, power poles snapped in half, power lines down, power outages of course, and water, water, water everywhere. The hardest-hit areas for power outages seem to be to our south. Our power went out momentarily but came right back on and, of course, as with every single time it rains hard here, we lost the DirecTV and the internet for a while. I don't know what it looks like outside at our place because it still is dark, but we are surrounded by an ocean of water. I'm betting at least 3" of rain fell just based on the huge amount of water surrounding the house. We feel fortunate as there were tornadoes to our southwest, in particular just across the river a bit and down in Montague County, TX, where my dad grew up, which sits catty-corner to Love County's southwestern corner. The Bowie, TX, area got hit by one or more tornadoes, and the Burkburnett, TX, area had some of the largest hail I've ever seen--I don't even know how to describe it, perhaps cantaloupe-sized. The stones certainly were significantly larger than grapefruit sized. These hailstones in some instances punched through the homes' exterior roof and then came through the ceiling and into the actual rooms of the homes. Can you imagine? My parents had that exact same sort of damage to their roof and home when I was either 20 or 21 and living in my first apartment. I was there in Fort Worth at the time, but not at their house, and I remember taking my sister home to Arlington with me to spend the night because my parents' house was such a mess. They got essentially a whole new interior (drywall, insulation, carpet, drapes, bedspreads, etc.) and exterior (windows, siding, roof, etc.) after their baseball to softball sized hail pushed through their roof, walls and ceiling and some flooring that year after the interior suffered damage from water and debris. The issue was that everyone else was in the same boat, so it was hard to find roofers and construction workers and many people's homes went a year or more before they were fully repaired and restored to normal. Last night, down in Texas they had ridiculously slow-moving storms and heavy flash flooding to our south, and then more damage on the TX side of the river to our southeast that could be tornado damage or straight-line wind damage. Some people in our county think their storm damage came from a tornado, and maybe it did, but I never saw anything on our radar that looked like a tornado, at least not after it crossed the river into OK. We had a lot of storm spotters out and some of them reporting some lowering of the clouds and also rotation in various places, but I don't know if any of them reporting a tornado on the ground. If they did, I missed it. Last night wasn't even supposed to be our best chance for heavy rainfall, but we got it anyway. Our best chance for heavy rainfall, if the forecast doesn't change, is Sunday. I don't know where we'll put more water. Dawn