Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Geese hunker down outside of Clovis High School as snow and sleet stuck around through Tuesday.
The National Weather Service called it "an epic and historic winter storm."
After summer-like temperatures extended well into fall, eastern New Mexico experienced its first wintry event early this week with drizzle, freezing fog, ice and a thin dusting of snow.
The blast, which included wind-chill factors in the single digits, began about midnight Sunday. Area residents woke up on Monday morning to ice on their windshields. Tuesday saw more of the same along with delayed and canceled school sessions.
Snow was expected to continue throughout Tuesday and into today across the region with accumulations up to a foot expected in places, which could break records for October.
"Gone are the warm, dry days of the past five weeks," meteorologists at the NWS in Albuquerque wrote on Monday in their area forecast discussion. "In its place is dramatically colder temperatures and widespread precipitation, mostly in the form of snow."
Roads across the region were icy, but local police departments reported no serious accidents through Tuesday morning.
Clovis, Farwell and Muleshoe schools all closed on Tuesday after light snow began in the early morning hours.
Temperatures were in the 20s most of Tuesday and expected to be in the 20s and 30s today. Forecasters predicted the snow would stop sometime today with temperatures warming into the high 40s by Friday and into the low 60s by Saturday.
While the weather may have felt like winter, the NWS in Albuquerque said the moisture is likely to be short-lived. Predictions for eastern New Mexico, and the state as a whole, show a warmer and drier winter than our yearly averages.
"This is due in part to La Niña, which will see a poleward shift of the jet stream and storm track, along with stronger than normal upper level high pressure over the U.S. west coast," said Blair Breitreiter, an NWS meteorologist. "As you might expect, this will have an additional impact on our snow totals as well, causing a decrease from average snow amounts. Whether we will see improvement in these conditions will depend on the strength and duration of La Niña."
While eastern New Mexico has seen heavy snowfall in October - about 5 inches fell in October 1976 - most of the region's snow falls in late November, December and January.
The heaviest snowfall in regional history occurred in the winter of 1911-1912, with more than 43 inches in Clovis. November 1911 saw 22.5 inches of snow, NWS records show.
The region averages about 10.5 inches of snowfall annually.
