This storm may not be the first one that comes to mind because it arrived 2 years after the historic snowstorm of January 1994. A record 15.9″ of snow fell in one day and Louisville set an all-time record low temperature of -22 degrees Fahrenheit. Now if that doesn’t overshadow the 1996 snow, 2 years later in February 1998, 22.4″ of snow fell during the three day period in Louisville! Chris Stachelski of NOAA has more about the Blizzard of ‘96…
It was the marquee meteorological event of one of the more epic winters ever — a storm that, if you experienced it, still stands out in your memory to this date. You might not remember just how much snow fell, but that there was a lot of it. That it stranded you in place for a time. And then you had to dig on out. And in some places, the storm laid the foundation for another significant weather event in the subsequent weeks. It was the Blizzard of ‘96. Even though many areas have been impacted by it have seen bigger snowfalls in years since (February 2003 from the President’s Day II Storm, the Blizzards of February 2010, the Boxing Day Storm of December 2010, the snowstorms of February 2015 or more recently in January 2016), this storm is widely viewed as the Big One in the modern history of East Coast snowstorms of the last 25 years. It digs up memories akin to those from the Cleveland Superbomb in January 1978, the Blizzard of ‘78 in New England and metro New York City, the Megapolitan Storm of February 1983 and the Superstorm of March 1993 – storms that people still can recall decades later to extreme detail in some cases.
Storm Overview…