Merry Christmas, everyone. It’s a windy and very mild Christmas Day across Kentucky as Mother Nature collects on last year’s White Christmas snowstorm. The focus of the forecast is on a very busy and progressively colder pattern for the closing days of the year and the beginning of the brand new year.
Anyone who knows me knows I love everything Christmas. My favorite movie is It’s A Wonderful Life and it has been since I was a kid. Not only is it about the Bailey family (no relation😜), but the movie features some of the best Christmas movie snow scenes ever.
The movie was actually shot during a California heat wave, so how the heck did they get all that snow? I ran across this from Life Magazine…
Movie snow in the early decades of film-making was usually white-coated cornflakes, sometimes mixed with shaved gypsum, and they produced so much audible crunching and crackling when actors walked across it that dialog was often over-dubbed afterwards. For It’s a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra, who was trained as an engineer, and RKO studio’s special effects wizard, Russell Sherman, developed their own artificial snow, one befitting the hushed beauty of a winter night in the fictional town of Bedford Falls.
Utilizing technology made available after World War II, Sherman’s crew mixed foamite — the material used in fire extinguishers and sometimes marketed under the brand name Phomaide—with sugar and water (or, by some accounts, with soap flakes) to create a substance that could be sprayed virtually anywhere, tucking tiny Bedford Falls under a wintery blanket of white.
The foamite solution was pumped at high pressure through a wind machine to create the look of freshly fallen snow on trees, streets and in drifts against buildings. Some 6,000 gallons of this new pseudo-snow were used in the making of It’s a Wonderful Life, and the RKO Effects Department received a Technical Award from the Motion Picture Academy for the development of the new white stuff. The artificial snow even clung convincingly to clothing and created picture-perfect footprints, while generating nothing like the sound of trod-upon breakfast cereal. This enabled Capra to record the film’s sound live, lending yet another layer of authenticity to the finished movie.
Check out some of the amazing behind the scenes pics of the snow making…
As someone who’s a big fan of the movie, those behind the scene pics are just amazing and something I needed in a year I haven’t been my normal Christmas self.
Here’s the link to the full article from Life Magazine
Maybe that’s what we should be doing around here this weekend?! 😭
It’s another windy day with near record high temps showing up, especially across the west. A couple of showers will also fire up ahead of a weak front dropping in here tonight and early Sunday. That knocks the numbers down a bit, but the stage is set for a nasty looking pattern across our region to end the year and begin 2022.
A MASSIVE temperature fight is setting up across the country and Kentucky is the battleground. This means frequent storm systems working through here with showers and thunderstorms, some of which could be strong.
Here’s how the GFS sees things through the end of the year…
The same run of the GFS then develops a big time storm system to usher in the new year…
The rainfall numbers from this run of the GFS are off the charts…
The Canadian Model is nowhere near as threatening as the GFS…
The Canadian is pushing the cold in and has it taking control…
The Canadian Ensembles continue to show much of the country turning frigid…
The EURO is busy and colder like the Canadian…
I will have another update later today. Until then, here are your scattered shower tracking radars…
Merry Christmas and take care.
Merry Christmas, fellow weather weenies!!
morning…………………..
MERRY CHRISTMAS to the entire Staff at WKYT and all the Bloggers on KWC !!!
Special thanks to Meteorologist Chris Bailey for educating us on the weather each and everyday.
Chris, I wish you and your entire Family a very MERRY CHRISTMAS !!!
Merry Christmas to all the readers at this site.
And a special Holiday toast to Chris who brings his weather forecasting A game every day.
A Merry Christmas to all! let’s not give up the snow fight, I Believe, I Believe.
Weather history made… Chicago has now gone the longest ever in a fall/winter season waiting for the first measurable snowfall (0.1 inches or more) of the season. Only trace amounts of snow have fallen. The previous latest date of the first measurable snowfall was Dec. 20th, 2012.
Some parts of the Chicago area received a few tenths of an inch of snow on November 12th (the NWS Forecast Office received 0.6 inches) which quickly melted, but Chicago’s O’Hare Airport received only a trace.
It’s a sunny, mild, snowless 48-degree Christmas day here in the SW suburbs.
Everyone have a good Christmas!
It’s 72 here Mike Illinois all across the state of ky is enjoying spring like temps. I don’t like the set up we got coming once the cold air arrives. Merry Christmas to all!!