cyclone77

Snowflakes are surprisingly large considering how gusty the winds are. No granulation at all unless the flakes started out giant cottonballs aloft lol.

As often as I can get away with Back to heavy snow with another enhanced band overhead.

HRRR and RAP both give you guys another 0.5" of precip through tomorrow, which should be a good 6-7" easily. Cedar Rapids will not be denied this winter, we all know that lol.

Small flakes now that we're back to light snow, but under the enhanced band that came through flake size was quite nice. Snow rates outside the enhanced bands are pretty poor. This is gonna be a long duration thing, so it's gonna take all night to build up amounts to what we expect/hope. Haven't measured, but looks like a good half inch to inch so far but there's lots of blowing making it hard to tell by glancing out the window.

Heavy snow falling atm.

Maybe the Saturday-Sunday system can get Des Moines up over 50" lol. When you're hot you're hawt.

Yeah it's been great. I'm not a huge snow cover aficionado like Michigansnowfreak but it's been great having solid snow cover through the heart of the winter season.

0.2" for north Alabama.

You guys are absolutely killing it this year. Only 0.1" here lol. You guys are now over a foot ahead of us for the season. Luckily the sleet storm from hell solidified our glacier and made the most of what fell.

Finally starting to snow after 10hrs of top down saturation.

Coldest temp of the season so far this morning here at zero. DVN also bottomed out at zero, and MLI at 2 above. Still awaiting that first subzero temp at all locations.

One of my all time favorites was the 12/1/06 storm. It wasn't too crazy as far as snow totals here (11"), but we just narrowly escaped getting completely shut out by the northwest edge of the precip. The wall of snow backed in from the southeast and stalled about 20-30 miles northwest of here, and on the other side of that they didn't get a flake. When the snow moved in it went from nothing to heavy snow in 10-15 minutes, and the winds picked up as it started to precipitate as well. Models had been showing us right on the extreme cutoff so it was difficult to forecast and figure out how much would fall. IIRC the official forecast from DVN had us in like 3-6" or something. Just southeast of here in Princeton they had 18". Radar animation using DVN site.

With the sun out you can see parts of the snowpack glisten where the icy glaze is exposed where snow had blown off to drift elsewhere.

Originally was going to go into meteorology, but instead of that following the weather/chasing (very little anymore lol) is a hobby. Been into weather since I was a kid though. Been a chemist going on 17 years now, hard to believe it's been that long already. Time flies!

Congrats daddylonglegz and bo!

GHDII radar from LOT

36 today but didn't lose much. Still a good 5-6" snowpack.

Coldest temp of the season so far this morning at 5. Lofted up to 36 this afternoon. Still a good 6" of snowpack, with lots of drifting from last night's near 50mph winds. The fresh 2" that fell Sunday really blew around on that crusty ice underneath it.

One thing I remember about GHD2 is that we were sort of caught in a thermal ridge much of that first evening. Had rain mixing in with the snow deep into the evening which kept much from accumulating. Models were consistent with a lot of snow to come after the full changeover but it was a bit frustrating hanging onto the mix so long. It ended up working out for the best though as the extremely wet snow and rain mix was slowly caking trees, and once it fully transitioned to all snow the trees REALLY got caked. Woke up the following morning to significant tree damage to one of the trees in the backyard as very heavy snow continued to fall. Ended up with around 15".

Getting 40-50mph wind gusts the past 20 mins or so. Roaring out there. DVN gusted to 51mph a short while ago, MLI 48mph.

GHDI was a very monumental event of course. The hype for that one was well founded, and lasted quite awhile before the storm hit. Models were pretty locked in on that one from the start it seemed. Below are just a few images I saved from guidance shortly before the storm hit. One was from the RUC backup, and the other was from the RAP IIRC. Also, here's a radar time lapse from LOT of the event. I wish I would have made it with the regular color palette instead of the winter themed one, but here it is. Love how you can see the LE snows kick in towards the end as the synoptic snows began to pull away.

Had several decent snow showers with large flakes. Looked legit out there a few times, albeit for only a few mins each.

Yeah looking forward to it. They also can grow 5ft or more per year, so should be fun to watch take off in coming years.

Man we really need a system to track lol

Very nice. I'll be putting a dawn redwood in the front side yard in the spring. It's a conifer, but it loses it's needles every fall which is pretty cool. Can grow over 100ft tall eventually. Example of one below