Blizzard of December 1963

Does anyone know anything about or remeber the blizzard that hit the maritimes (PEI especially) back on December 19/20th 1963? There were some very impressive wind gusts; Charlottetown had a gust of 177km/h, Sydney hit 138km/h, Greenwood 129km/h and Shearwater hit 126 km/h. Many other airport sites had wind gusts in excess of 120km/h. It seemed like the strongest winds were on the back side of the storm, comming from north-west. 65cm of snow fell in Greenwood. Charlottetown and Summerside had zero visibility for almost a day. Baromtric pressure dropped to 94.7mb in Sydney. Must have been an awsome storm..

Before my time. :lol:

Looks like it was a really wound-up system, probably occluded and nearly stalled over the Gulf of St Lawrence. Only brought 14 cm to Gander. Started out with easterly winds with gusts up to 113 km/h, they then veered to southerly with gusts near 100 km/h, but temperatures never got above 0°, and actually started cooling off when winds went from SE to SSE, suggesting a lot of cold air wrapping all the way around the low, and the warm sector well cut off from the centre.

Stephenville picked up 73 cm over 3 days - a combination of synoptic snow followed by gulf-effect snowsqualls.

In looking through climate data from the 1950's and 1960's, it appears there were alot of very high wind gusts recorded at the airport sites. Each year, there were gusts in the 120-140 km/h range, and these days gusts like those are almost unheard of.

Was it beacuse the storms were more powerful and frequent back then? Or was it because of the instruments they were using, which may not have been accurate?

My theory is that it might have to do with more and more structures being built around airports, which act to increase the drag on the wind. The stats do show a downward trend at some of the airports over the decades, especially in the most recent times. Here are some numbers, showing the total number of dates wind gusts of 90+ km/h have been recorded at a few sites:

YQX (Gander Airport)
1960's: 203
1970's: 143
1980's: 118
1990's: 76
2000's: 12

YYT (St. John's Airport)
1960's: 260
1970's: 263
1980's: 212
1990's: 120
2000's: 62

YQY (Sydney Airport)
1960's: 106
1970's: 92
1980's: 47
1990's: 26
2000's: 15

YFC (Fredericton Airport)
1960's: 28
1970's: 22
1980's: 11
1990's: 15
2000's: 2

Would be nice to have a good dataset for sites that are not airports, but such data for windspeeds for that length of time is hard to find. However I did locate some numbers for Bonavista:

1960's: 154
1970's: 298
1980's: 330
1990's: 306
2000's: 410

Not sure how to explain the low count there in the 60's, might be different instrumentation, but the trend there has actually been upward. Could be that modern instruments are actually more sensitive to wind, and if that's the case, then the real downward trend at the airports might be even more extreme than it appears.

Interesting, for sure.

My father would remember , we were living on the Island at that time. I was too young then to remember myself. I can remember seeing pictures from around that time , they had to dig tunnels through the drifts on the sidewalks so people could get around.

I looked up some stuff on that event ... see the directory I set up at http://www.novaweather.net/Uploads/Dec_1963/

Check out the pressure pattern and how fast this monster developed!:

http://www.novaweather.net/Uploads/Dec_1963/SLP_19_00Z.png
http://www.novaweather.net/Uploads/Dec_1963/SLP_19_12Z.png
http://www.novaweather.net/Uploads/Dec_1963/SLP_20_00Z.png

It dropped about 36 mb in 12 hours...which is about the upper end of deepening rates I've seen for winter bombs. Last December's wind event in NS (2008) deepened 18 mb in 6 hours - a similar rate as the 1963 event. I don't have 6-hourly output, but you can see the amazing change over 12 hours.

The lowest pressure at Sydney was 952 mb! I saved all the data in the directory if you want to do some more looking. I did not find anything of note when I google-searched, oddly enough.

In the .txt observation files, the wind column is titled DD FFF which shows the degrees from which wind was blowing with last digit dropped (e.g. 23 = 230 degrees = SW wind, 02 = 020 degrees = NNE wind). The FFF is wind 'force' (speed) in km/h. It is the mean wind speed. The max wind speed gust for the day is shown at the bottom of the tables.

The sea level pressure pattern at 12Z on the 19th is attached directly (below).
Chris

Attached Image (Click thumbnail to expand)

The trends are suspicious to me ... a more robust metric for long term wind trends might be the sustained wind. The recording manner (continuous readout versus manually watching a needle near the top of the hour) may be important questions to ask. The time sample period and instrument (anemometer) type could also be factors. The trend makes one think of these things.

Chris

Very suspicous indeed. I think it is an issue with either the instrumentation, or the length of time defined as a "wind gust". What is the standard these days for a wind gust... 5 seconds, or 2.5 seconds? The older instruments may have measured gusts every 1 second or less, and they were very likely mechanical rather than electronic.

It's 5s for definition of gust. In the older days winds were recorded instantaneously on a rolling graph I think, where often the manned obs these days from the airport sites just report gusts by eye - watching a needle or digital display. The continuous readout would catch the max gust in the older sense. Might be best to look at the automatic weather sites where human view is not "undersampling" the wind. Wind is best monitored by and logged by machine.

Chris

Anyway to get a satellite shot of the storm ?? I bet it would rival the looks of white juan.