It was the last day of March and temperatures soared into the mid-80s Tuesday in Little Rock, but it will officially go down as a day of record snowfall.
John Lewis, senior forecaster with the National Weather Service in North Little Rock, said the agency considers all frozen precipitation as snow when it compiles it into its historical data.
So when hail fell Tuesday in Arkansas' capital city, in the record books it translated into a trace amount of snowfall. And that resulted in the agency on Wednesday putting out a notice — as it does when any climatological record is tied or eclipsed — that a "record snowfall of trace inches was set" for March 31 in Little Rock, tying a mark last seen in 2013.
Lewis said such snowfall records are set in the same way even during scorching summer months when hail is recorded.
Jim Cantore, a well-known on-air meteorologist for the Weather Channel, took notice of the record report in a tweet to his 298,000 followers.
"After a high of 84 and hail yesterday, I thought this was an April fool's joke!!" he wrote Wednesday morning, noting the caveat that it was really hail.
Lewis said all hail counts as a trace amount of snow, regardless of its size. So even north of Greenbrier where storms produced baseball-sized hail on Tuesday, it will be recorded as a trace amount of snow.