By Felicia A. Petro

Allied News Staff Writer

Seasons come and seasons go, and winter has arrived with a vengeance.

“We’ve had snow nine out of the last 10 days. I don’t think we’ve had that stretch last year, constantly day after day,” said Jim Cochran, a local weather buff in Worth Township, Mercer County.

Cochran’s home weather station primarily tracks temperatures, wind speed and rainfall, which he records on his computer to gauge monthly averages.

However, he’s constantly checking out local news stations and keeping an eye out for particularly bad weather.

Besides the continuous snowfall, one unusual phenomena that’s happened this winter was “that light (freezing) drizzle” on Wednesday, he said.

Cochran explained that three things occurred in the atmosphere to make that happen.

“The upper atmosphere was letting it snow, and it had a warm layer underneath to melt those snowflakes, then the lower level was in the 20s, to make it re-freeze as drizzle,” he said.

“Then the ground temperature was going to freeze anything that dropped unless salt or calcium on roads would make it not freeze.”

It was like a “sandwich,” Cochran said. “You have to have all three conditions right ... to have freezing drizzle.”

Last year was marked with more ice storms, which is different from freezing drizzle, he noted.

“This (drizzle) was just a skim of ice, very thin. You can’t see it,” Cochran said. “The volume of precipitation coming out of the sky is more with ice storms, and puts more weight on trees and power lines.”

Cochran reports some of his findings to the National Weather Service’s SKYWARN program in Pittsburgh.