They are calling it the upside-down winter.  There’s hardly any snow at the Winter Games in Vancouver, but it’s piling up throughout the south.  There’s more snow in Charlotte than in Boston.  A week ago, the folks at the Portland Maine Winter Festival had to cancel the event as there was nothing to sculpt lobsters out of, or to throw at each other.  Meanwhile, on the same day, record storms hit Florida, Louisiana and Texas; over a foot fell in Dallas.  On February 11, USA today reported that over 2/3 of the United States was snow-covered, with a headline that read, “49 States Dusted With Snow.”

That got the attention of a meteorology grad student at the University of Oklahoma named Patrick Marsh.  He has a weather blog (cool!) for publishing his research findings.  He got the notion of documenting every state’s snow conditions, and tweeted his friends to send him photos.  What he got was a blizzard.  Over the next two days, he received an email every two minutes with photos pouring in from every corner of the country.  By the morning of February 13, Marsh had posted slide shows for every state from Alabama to Wyoming.  But there was one holdout:  Hawaii.  Though the summit of

Hawaii’s volcano Mauna Kea rises over 13,000 feet, and occasionally gets some snowfall, there had been no snow in several weeks and none was in the forecast.  Marsh concluded that USA Today was right and went back to his studies.

But email never rests.  Later that night, a message pinged into Marsh’s inbox that read, “Last night I sent you two photos of current snow on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea. Did you not receive them?”  Marsh scrolled down the message which had been sent to him from a father and son who had been hiking on the volcano.  Attached to the message were two photos of the volcano’s north face, showing a small patch of snow the size of a kitchen table.  Marsh forwarded the photos to the National Weather Service office in Honolulu, whose staff confirmed the photographs were in fact the summit of Mauna Kea, and were clearly dated February 11.  They concluded the snow was legitimate, and was a remnant of a storm from way back in November.

And so the upside-down winter has its signature moment, when there was snow on the ground in all 50 states.  Thanks to a diligent student, a pair of hikers, social networking, and the snows of Mauna Kea.