A Real Snow Storm With an Ice Topping!!

After some cold, messy dustings, the Big Snow set up is perfect and the eastern seaboard, from the deep south to New England, gets hammered with the white stuff...and sleet and freezing rain and just rain on the coast. A serious mess!! Here in the central piedmont of Va. there is about 8 inches of snow with a lovely ice crust on top.  The ice is working for the birds as the seed I have thrown out is easy to get to and the little feathered monsters are chowing down. It's a tough day out there on Earth! The wise will tread carefully outside or stay inside; I'm thinking travel outside today will be best accomplished on skis.
The set up: strong high pressure off the Maritimes locking cold, dry air deep into the south, a big low that had hammered the northwest riding the jet stream deep into the south, a stop to slurp some moisture from the gulf and a roll up the east coast riding over the cold air and dropping all that moisture as snow, sleet, freezing rain.  The big snow part is done but there will likely be another little dusting on our ice with the wrap around as the storm heads up the east coast. The perfect southern storm. Enjoy!!
In shaking and eruption news: other than a little shake up along the St. Lawrence in southeast Canada the earthquake news is pretty status quo, the Pacific rim and Indo-Asian boundary and nothing in the 6 magnitude range. The volcano list has no real surprises: 2 in the Kurils, 2 on Kamchatka, Indonesia rules with 4 belching mountains with two more nearby on PNG and in India's Andaman Isles. Etna still rumbles on Sicily, Fox Island in the Aleutians and Hawaii keep the US on the list and on the eastern RingOFire: Mexico, Nicaragua, Ecuador and Peru all make the list. It's an active planet, beware if near plate boundaries.
The sky is mostly cloudy but if it clears the near full moon (It's full Valentine's Day @ 6:53pmEST) will make for good lighting for night time snow excursions. Jupiter was above the waxing gibbous moon Tuesday evening and along with the bright stars of winter make for spectacular star gazing. Venus rules the morning sky before dawn, ridiculously bright although Saturn and Mars, while much less bright, are out and lovely.  Mercury, zooming around the sun, passes between the Earth and Sun (inferior conjunction) on  Saturday and won't be easily visible until March lower left of Venus in the morning sky.
If it's snow adventures you seek, it's your time; get out but bundle up and be careful, today on Earth.