That's freaking awesome!

After today, maybe a Winter Olympics is in order? :)

http://imageshack.us/a/img10/8625/20130220161742.jpg

http://imageshack.us/a/img195/5874/20130220160227.jpg

abc15 has some cool pictures of the snow in Phoenix today...including light rail trains cutting through the snow:

http://www.abc15.com/gallery/news/ne...hrough-arizona

That's not snow. It is a mix of hail and graupel. It was almost scary how quickly the media hopped on the "it's snowing in Phoenix" bandwagon today. I believe I heard "meteorologist" Caribe Devine on 12 News refer to this as "white precipitation." How scientific. Snow doesn't bounce when it falls, nor is does it fall as balls of ice.

I guess everyone moves here from the Midwest and East Coast and automatically forgets what snow is...

actually in some parts it was snow.

Where I am, in Paradise Valley, and where PHX31 was, in central Phoenix, it was hail, but further northeast you can bet your ass it was snow. I know people who were in it, and they aren't all naive Arizonans like you'd like to believe, Freeway, rather some moved here from snowy areas.

Yeah, the East Valley also got real snow.

Graupel did fall in most areas, especially in Central Phoenix...however, like VLJ wrote, it did snow in parts of metro Phoenix today. Either way, it was icy and cold white stuff on the ground. The picture of Salt River Fields and the mountains around town are of real snow cover.

FYI: graupel (a.k.a. soft hail and snow pellets) is formed when small, supercooled droplets of water collect on, and freeze to a snowflake. From Wikipedia:
Graupel (german pronounciation: ['gʁaʊpɛl], also called soft hail or snow pellets)[1] refers to precipitation that forms when supercooled droplets of water are collected and freeze on a falling snowflake, forming a 2–5 mm (0.079–0.197 in) ball of rime. Strictly speaking, graupel is not the same as hail or ice pellets, although it is sometimes referred to as small hail. However, the World Meteorological Organization defines small hail as snow pellets encapsulated by ice, a precipitation halfway between graupel and hail.[2]

I live in the foothills of the McDowell Mountains, off of Thompson Peak Parkway, one of the coldest areas of the Valley. I took the 101 home from work today, right by Salt River Field, and was caught in the backup due to road conditions. I will tell you that was NOT snow on the roadway and the white covering the ground was NOT snow either. It was graupel and hail. I got home to very low snow levels on the McDowells (rare), but no snow in sight. Sorry to crush anyone's belief that it snowed in much of the Valley today. That was not snow. The people who told you otherwise, including the media, were lying. It was in the low to mid 40s around much of the Valley when this supposed "snow" was falling. Anyone who knows anything knows that true snow doesn't make it to the ground at that temperature and it most certainly does not stick, especially to the roads. Just another lame attempt to try to put Phoenix in the news...
(rant over)

....Back to development news.

You seem to be the only naysayer in the bunch....

Your comment seems annoyed and douchey. Next time it rains, you'll remind us that it was just drizzle and therefore not considered rain because in the Midwest, blah, blah. :slob:

Where was that?? I live near 7th Ave/Thomas and we had nothing resembling that. Just some tiny hail that people keep telling me was called graupel, but nothing that stuck or even threatened to.

Up near Maryland.

Just for Laughs

http://imageshack.us/a/img20/2830/54...0199985349.jpg

LOL nice!

I wrote an article for Blooming Rock about the Roosevelt St situation, enjoy:


http://tinyurl.com/a2mpmmx

Nice job! I agree with everything you wrote. It is such a no-brainer. It's infuriating that city leaders in Phoenix just don't get it.

Great article. I don't know why the parallel parking thing is such a mystery to the City of Phoenix. As you pointed out, just look at other successful urban streets...just do what they are doing, what's so difficult about that?

The frustrating part to me is not that the Streets Dept. doesn't get it. We likely have the worst Streets Dept. of any big City in America. But the fact that some of the more powerful business owners on Roosevelt are super against parallel parking is insane. Metered parallel parking was invented (in OKC) as a way to improve business and it worked! There's tons of studies showing that in an urban retail district, each on street parking spot results in 5x the amount of consumer spending in that district than if it didn't exist.

Its just a maddening conversation:

Me/Other people "Parallel parking provides safety for pedestrians and will help your businesses."

Streets Dept/Business Owners: "No we want a pedestrian friendly area, not parking thats for the 'burbs!"

Me/Other people: "Oh sorry, perhaps you've misunderstood what we meant. Here's a pile of studies and examples from awesome cities. See, isnt that cool?"

Streets Dept/Business Owners: "Nope! We dont want it. We made up our minds already"


:doh:

What the hell kind of on-street parallel parking have they seen in the 'burbs? Huge parking lots? Yes. Parallel street parking? Not so much.

I think they just want to do the opposite of whatever big East Coast cities have, afterall I think that's a huge reason why a lot of people are out here...to get away from that. I can say that probably 95% of people I know hate parallel parking and some dont even like going downtown because they think all that is available is parallel parking. Then again most don't even know how to parallel park so I guess I can understand their dilemma.

You should ask, by a show of hands, how many people on the Streets Dept know how to parallel park. :D

I agree. I don't mind parallel parking because I can drive and I'm not afraid of dinging my bumpers...isn't that why we have them?!

I have put a lot of thought into this. I used to live in Boston and often ask "why don't they just copy successful cities, such as Boston?" Phoenix attracts transplants who left big cities of the east coast and the Midwest. Therefore, it's run by a bunch of folksy anti-urban officials, who have no idea how real cities function. As long as the budget is growing and balanced they could care less about the urban fabric because the city appears to be healthy even though it is dying at the core.

Why would they care about one street in central Phx when their constituents live in suburbia Phx? Phoenix has sprawled too much for most of the population to give a damn about central Phx. Downtown is no longer their town when they live 10-25 miles outside of the core.