By Nikki Forrester ow I’m sure you’ve all heard a lot of people complaining about the weather. It’s either too hot or too cold, or there’s too much rain or not enough rain. But for a curious cadre of keen-eyed observers, weather is not a source of complaints, it’s a way of life. David Lesher grew up surrounded by discussions of the weather, but he didn’t quite grasp the magnitude of these chats until an historic winter storm blanketed his home in Washington, D.C. with snow. At just 10 years old, Lesher learned how to log daily temperature throughout the storm from his father, a meteorologist for the Air Force. “It was the thing that lit the fire and it’s always been burning,” says Lesher. “Being a weather observer has been something I’ve done wherever I’ve lived.” Throughout his career creating maps for the U.S. Department of Defense, Lesher always recorded temperature data at home using an outdoor thermometer. When he moved to Canaan Valley 20 years ago, he continued pursuing his passion for winter weather. “I’m a firm believer that the winter is what brings people to Canaan Valley. It brought me here,” he says.
Canaan Valley sits upon the Allegheny Plateau, nestled along the crest of the Eastern Continental Divide. As
the highest elevation valley of its size east of the Mississippi, the weather in Canaan Valley is characterized by cool, pleasant summers and cold, snowy winters. The coldest temperature ever recorded was -27° F on January 21, 1985, and the highest was 96° F on July 16, 1988. Because of the cool weather and frequent hard frosts, Canaan Valley has a shorter growing season than Fairbanks, Alaska, which is only 100 miles south of the Arctic Circle. With an average last frost occurring on June 1 and first frost on August 30, the Valley’s average growing season is restricted to just 99 days. While it may be tricky to grow warmweather crops, Canaan Valley reaps a bounty of snow each winter, receiving an average of 12.9 feet (155 inches) of snow, based on the last 30 years of observations. The winter of 1995 – 1996 served up a record-breaking snowfall of 21.4 feet (256.8 inches). “That area creates its own weather,” says Robert Leffler, a climate expert for West Virginia’s high country who spent his career at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The broad hump of the Allegheny Mountains in north-central West Virginia forms a barrier about 100 miles long and 15 miles wide. “It’s not an isolated mountain peak, where the air can flow around it, like a boulder in a creek,” Leffler says. This hump forces the entire air mass up and over the mountains, which is the fundamental mechanism for creating snow in the region, also known as upslope snow.
26 HIGHLAND OUTDOORS WINTER 2020
As air is forced to go up in elevation over the mountains, it cools and any moisture is squeezed out, like wringing a towel. “The angle of that lift is perfect. It’s almost a 90-degree angle to the northwest wind, which maximizes lift,” says Leffler. “That’s why you get days and days of snow up there where it just doesn’t quit. There’s no atmospheric disturbance, there’s no storm, it’s just the lift of the mountains.”
George Thompson and his family started recording daily weather observations in Canaan Valley in 1944, which have continued unbroken since then. In 1994, the job passed onto Kenny Sturm and in 2013, Elaine George took over the task. George and Lesher are two of three observers in Tucker County that participate in the National Weather Service (NWS) Cooperative Observer Program. The program, which was created in 1890, relies on the efforts of more than 8,700 volunteers nationwide. When Lesher joined the program in fall 2001, the NWS gave him a weather station and equipment to ensure that the data being collected was standardized across the country. Every morning at 7 a.m., Lesher records high and low temperatures along with precipitation and snowfall for the NWS. He jokes, “It’s not well-suited for somebody who likes sleeping in.” Along with providing weather data to the NWS, Lesher updates a publicly available spreadsheet with his daily