For a few days earlier this year, Oklahoma found itself under a layer of snow, creating an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for one OU student and reminding Oklahomans of the unpredictable nature of weather.

Oklahoma’s snowfall totals this year were above normal, said Frederick H. Carr, OU School of Meteorology director.

Carr said 29 inches of snow fell in Guymon this winter, setting the season’s record. Oklahoma City found itself beneath a little more than 23 inches, just off the record of 25 inches, he said.

“Even southeastern Oklahoma got into the act with a half of a foot to a foot of snow falling across that area,” he said.

Carr said he thinks the excess of snowfall taught meteorologists just how difficult it is to predict how all the different factors of the atmosphere and ocean will interact with each other to bring the state variable weather.

For example, he said meteorologists did not expect El Nino to become as strong as it did, nor did they see the Arctic Oscillation anomaly becoming particularly strong as well.

So if those factors were not well forecasted, then the interaction of the two, which resulted in the cold and snowy weather across the eastern half of the country, was definitely not seen in advance, he said.

However, all this snow gave Patrick Marsh, meteorology graduate student, the opportunity to collect photographs showing snow on the ground in all 50 states.

Marsh said he posted a message Feb. 11 on Twitter that said if it snowed in Florida on Friday, Feb. 12, then there would be snow on the ground in all 50 states at the same time.

A friend replied to that post to suggest Marsh gather snow photos from all 50 states.

He would do so, taking on a project to take “a snow shot of America.”

It turns out someone in Arkansas who saw that tweet, called the Associated Press bureau chief in Oklahoma City, Marsh said.

“The AP tracked me down and interviewed me about it,” Marsh said. “I told them about my snow project as well.”

When AP ran that story, Marsh said News 9 called him, and then wrote a news piece about the project.

“The Drudge Report picked up the story, and it was off to the races,” he said. “I spent all day Friday doing media interviews about the project for newspapers, radio and television.”

That Saturday night, Marsh got an e-mail from an astronomer working on Mount Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The e-mail contained a photo confirming what he had been waiting for: there was snow in Hawaii.

Marsh said, in all honesty, the project did not really teach meteorologists anything really meteorological.

“However,” he said, “a lot of people learned that Hawaii has snow on top of some of the volcanoes.”

But clearing all that snow from the streets in Oklahoma cost state and local authorities time and money.

The Oklahoma Department of Transportation had already has spent $9 million by February removing snow and ice from roads, said David Meuser, ODOT spokesman. ODOT spent only $7.7 million last winter on snow and ice removal, he said.

ODOT has an overall budget of $140 million. The normal cost for keeping roads safe each winter is $7 to $8 million, he said.

For next winter, Carr said it is very difficult to predict if the winter weather will be as it was this year.

The latest oceanic forecast models indicate the possible development of La Nina conditions, which can influence our weather, he said.

And La Nina sometimes means drier and warmer winters for our part of the country, so meteorologists will have to wait and see what develops, he said. “However, the natural variability of the climate says we should be prepared for just about anything,” he said.