Sometimes it's hard for us to choose one bizarre weather event for the "On This Date" column. So, let's do a two-fer today.
On Dec. 2, 1970, 55 years ago today, a tornado was seen by an observer in the mountains of northern Utah, just below the Timpanogos Divide, about 70 miles southeast of Salt Lake City.
The 300-yard-wide tornado rated F1 snapped up to 18-inch diameter trees over its mile-long path in this mountainous area near the towns of Provo Canyon and Sundance.
But perhaps most spectacular about this was that it happened at about 8,000 feet elevation, where 38 inches of snow was on the ground. That allowed the tornado to pull this snow thousands of feet up into the air, creating, in effect, a "snownado."
It'sone of only two December tornadoes on record in Utahsince 1950, according to NOAA's storm events database. The other one, an F0, damaged trees and a few homes in Pleasant View, north of Ogden, on Dec. 5, 1995.
Just four years earlier, another extreme event occurred.
According to weather historian Christopher Burt, a trained observer in Copenhagen, New York, measured 12 inches of snowfall in just one hour on Dec. 2, 1966. Burt told weather.com that's "the greatest accumulation for one hour in the U.S. that I'm aware of."
Most snowstorms can produce snowfall at a rate of maybe a few inches per hour. But a foot of snow in an hour is beyond comprehension for most of us.
The town of Copenhagen sits in the Tug Hill Plateau of upstate New York in the infamous Lake Ontario snowbelt, where bands of intense lake-effect snow often sit over an area for hours. Burt said Copenhagen ended up with 63 inches of snow over a 48-hour period from Dec. 1-2, 1966.
Jonathan Erdman is a senior meteorologist at weather.com and has been covering national and international weather since 1996. Extreme and bizarre weather are his favorite topics. Reach out to him onBluesky,X (formerly Twitter)andFacebook.
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