The Great Equinox Storm

Tony Wood has an article at Philly.com about the recent snowstorm:

If we can believe the forecasts, the vernal equinox felt a whole lot more like the winter solstice, with snow, even a few inches, in parts of the region. Spring snows certainly aren’t all that unusual, and snow has been measured in Philadelphia as late as 24 April.
 But the nor’easter that battered the area with heavy wet snow, starting on 19 March 1958, a Wednesday, and continuing into the 21st , the first day of spring, was a Hall of Famer. It ripped down power lines, and the storm remains in the top ten for PECO outages, even though its service territory was obviously far less populated back then.
Heavy snow began that Wednesday afternoon, but the bulk of it came in the early-morning hours, and that created problems. The temperature never got below 32 during the storm, but the fact that the heaviest fell during darkness allowed the snow to pile up on streets.
Officially, Philadelphia recorded over eleven inches, almost ten of that on Thursday. Rain mixed in with the snow that day, and it all ended as snow on Friday.
According to the National Climatic Data Center, Morgantown set a daily record on the 20th with 38 inches of snow. The station also reported 6 inches on the 19th and 21st for a storm total of fifty inches.
The climate center said the measurements were taken at a station elevated six hundred feet, which would have made a difference. Higher is colder, and snow has less opportunity to change to rain before reaching a surface.
We must express a reservation about the measurement, however. The precipitation total at Morgantown was just over three inches, and the snow-to-liquid ratio would look a tad higher than the temperatures would suggest. That said, yes, that was one mighty snowfall.

Rico says he and his ladyfriend came back from sunny and warm Mexico just in time for this storm...