Kuchera is actually really simplistic. You just take the max column temp below 500 mb, subtract it from -2 celsius and add it to 12.
So for example if the max column temp was -12 celsius, you would do 10+12 so 22:1 ratios.
waiting for the official number but looks like we got down to -12 or -13 this morning. Just short of the record again. We just had the 7th coldest first half of February for MSN. Looking forward to the slow climb out of this now. The cold has overstayed its welcome.
One positive around here is that the consistent snow cover has lead to a fairly shallow frost depth. So when we do warm up the ground won’t stay frozen for long and will be able to soak up water
Looks like we’ll end up right on the edge of the snow and get a dusting. Congrats to all to the SE who will get a great system. Can’t wait to watch all this snow melt after this
https://www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/users/meg/gefs_plumes/index.html?stationname=KMSN
Just wanted to show everybody this website. Its the equivalent of the SREF plumes but for the GFS ensemble. You can just select the station on the map and you can bookmark it. Very helpful for seeing how the GEFS members are trending.
One reason is that they count any frozen precip as snow so in a storm with a lot of sleet it’ll be counted as 10:1 instead of 4:1 or so. That’s not happening here but it may be something they are doing when calculating the kuchera method, like the max column temp they are using is lower for some reason which really inflates ratios
it really matters how much of the column is in the dendritic growth zone and other factors like fracturing of snowflakes by the wind. Low temps don't always equal crazy high ratios. For a major synoptic storm like this it's pretty tough to average more than 15:1.
Only three years since 2000 have we not hit 57 by the end of March, and in those 3 years we got it in the first week of April. Some warmer stretches will be here before you know it