The summer is shaping into a pretty good rafting season for Tee Davis.

“It’s awesome, man,” said Davis, owner of Smoky Mountain Adventures.

Much better than last summer, anyway. Last year, rains wreaked havoc on the rafting season. 

“Night and day,” Davis said. “It helps when the river’s not out of its banks.”

It’s no secret that an accurate weather forecast is hard to come by in the Smokies. But after two months of intense measurements at more than 100 stations around the region, scientists working with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration are crunching data that could change that. 

“I think we’ve made an important contribution to understand the hydrology and the water cycle of the Smokies,” said Ana Barros, professor of earth and ocean science at Duke University and principal investigator on the Smokies project. 

The National Weather Service has confirmed that a tornado formed during an afternoon of thunderstorms and high winds that ripped through Western North Carolina two weeks ago.

Limeade, tequila and cointreau is not a wintry mix — that is a margarita; something you may resort to when a wintry mix turns your driveway into a sheet of ice.

The ingredients for a wintry mix are a combination of two or more of these types of frozen/freezing precipitation, snow, ice pellets/sleet, freezing rain and/or graupel (pronounced grapple.) Basic precipitation mechanics are involved.

Have you ever been told by the evening news to expect three inches of snow overnight, but after stocking up on bread, toilet paper and flashlight batteries, you walk out the next morning, snow shovel in hand, to find only a pitiful dusting in the driveway? If you live in Western North Carolina, chances are you’ve been there, done that.

By Julia Merchant • Staff Writer

It’s been more than a week since Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue raised some eyebrows with his atypical approach to getting rain to fall in the drought-ravaged state. With no rainfall in site and the lake supplying Atlanta’s water rapidly dwindling, Perdue joined 250 citizens in a last ditch effort to combat the drought — he bowed his head and prayed.

One of my daughter Izzy’s favorite videos is “Little Bear’s Winter Tales.” She likes the episode with the blizzard. The mantra for the characters becomes, “Whether the weather is hot or whether the weather is cold, we’ll weather the weather whatever the weather, whether we like it or not.” It seems like an appropriate mantra for Western North Carolina.