frostfern

The local slope and surface vegetation has a huge impact too. Where the taller grass isn't fully matted down it tends to melt quicker because the dry grass poking through warms in the sun and melts the snow around it. Areas near pavement with a lot of tall grass always melt first. Wooded areas that don't have much grass or undergrowth and have a north facing slope retain snow the best.

It looks like the main wave will be inland somewhere around Vancouver by 18z Monday. It still has to loop down through the southwest at that point, which can be tricky to forecast. The more subtle northern stream portion will be headed due south over the northern Yukon.

It's hard to say what the average is. It's only 4" in more urban zones, but it's around 8" in the woods some places. The 16" of 20:1 lake effect fluff from early January didn't melt evenly. At one point it was totally gone some places and compressed to around 4" others. The 3" of concrete snow a couple nights ago added quite a bit to the piles even though it didn't add a lot of depth as it soaked up some light rain and drizzle the following day. There's a lot of really thick ice on my driveway as I didn't get a chance to shovel all the slush off before it froze hard. The light dusting that's been falling today somehow managed to make it even more slippery to walk on. Even the dog keeps flopping on her belly. Yea. It's kind of a weird setup with rather light winds but decent lake instability.

Yea. The OP Euro doesn't phase the jets at all, while the GFS phases too late and too far south for my liking. I really should stop obsessing over OP runs while the ensembles are still all over the place. The parent wave is south of Alaska at this point.

The crusty snow here varies from 3" in open fields to as much as 8" in some shady spots where the late January base never fully melted.

Would like a real storm for once this year. Tired of being nickle and dimed on the fringe of events missing south. Two years of this nonsense. Rather just have a rain storm at this point.

I see earlier runs have a small shortwave diving down from BC into the rear of the cutoff. The major southern stream low kicks off when it rounds the base. Later runs that's completely gone.

I think the southwestern upper low being slower to eject is also part of the problem. The models always struggle if there is not a major upstream event over the pacific to force it out.

Severe outbreak looks more certain than anything else with this system.

Yep. Nice trowel track for SW MI too.

Well, 00z GFS is farther south with mostly snow here. Euro has an ice storm followed by dry slot for SW lower.

The most probable disappointing outcome will be either a strong miss NW or a much weaker miss SE. It just doesn’t seem to have the amount of cold behind it compared to last time.

Yikes!

Some very heavy bursts of snow this morning. It's just not accumulating particularly fast as it's about as wet as can be without changing to straight rain.

I'm ready to see some weenie snow maps. OP Euro and GFS are putting out a swath of concrete with the trailing wave.

Bring it. The roads need a good cleaning from the salt and sand residue.

It looks like more of a lake-enhanced event here, but the air aloft is not very cold due to the PV being well north. Good clippers this late in the season around here need to have much steeper lapse rates. The GFS has a better front-end thump a couple days later, but ECMWF has nothing as of now.

That's accurate. Really got screwed by the sharp cutoff.

That map smoothed out the northwest gradient or something. There wasn't over 6 inches here. It was 4.5. It was mostly dusty little flakes so it's not very high ratio.

Its currently drizzling here. Virga hole on radar. Dry layer between 5k and 10k feet needs to fill in before returns can reach the ground.

I think the 8" on the ground was still fairly fresh. There was no intermediate thaw. It makes sense the drifts were huge with 27 inches of powder being blown around by blizzard force winds.

67 was epic in the I-94 corridor. My parents weren't living in Michigan then though. They only remember Jan 78.

Hope you get your big dog total. Yesterday I was expecting a goose egg IMBY.

I don't know how many people who post are old enough to remember 1978. I always see these pictures of what looks like three feet of snow and drifts up to the roofs of cars but it seems misleading. My folks don't remember the details, but they seem to imply that there was a already a decent amount of snow on the ground before the storm. It would be like if you combined the constant clipper trains of Jan/Feb 2014 with GHD 1. GHD 1 happened after a cold and dry January with otherwise below normal snowfall. I imagine if there was already quite a bit of snow on the ground that was still powdery enough to blow and added whatever 12-18" fell in that particular storm you'd get those kind of drifts you see in pictures that give the illusion it snowed 6 feet. People you talk to still seem to think it snowed 2 feet in that storm when in reality it didn't. It never has snowed 2 feet in 24 hours.

Midnight to midnight is a weirdly arbitrary figure though. I'd just like to see the number of times an accumulation over 12" happens in any 24 hour period. GHD 1 was the last event I can recall that pulled that off in GRR. It gets rare as soon as you get east of the major NW flow lake effect belts. Biggest totals here are mostly synoptic / lake-effect combos that occur over a 48-72 hour period. It's just not the same as when it comes down heavy all at once. GHD 1 was special because the bulk of it came down in under 12 hours with a lot of wind to push it around. Closest thing I've seen to something you would see on the east coast.