michsnowfreak

Swirling snow. Beautiful night.

What a wild 24 hours. Spiking temps, the long lasting snow pack was wiped out by the 1st real rainstorm since before Christmas. Then plummeting temps after a 1/2 inch assault of sleet and now it's like a blizzard outside.

It is not falling apart.

Picked up a solid half inch of sleet causing frozen and rutted slippery streets. It has been years since we have had that much sleet (not one of the precip types we often get). Has since turned to snow and it's snowing and blowing nicely. A word of caution, with Grand Rapids radar being down you are going to get what appears to be drying and voids in the radar that are simply not the case.

We had freezing drizzle for a while and now it's been sleeting for about an hour. This was totally expected however. Should change over to snow hopefully in an hour or so

Only piles and drifts remain. It looks funny to see grass after having snow cover for so long. The rain is moving out. I'm actually happy because a lot of the pooling water was able to soak into the surface of the ground. Obviously the frost depth being 2' the ground is still very frozen but it warmed up enough for the surface to soak up some of that water. Now let's freeze it up and bring on the Winter part of the storm.

And that is in just over 3 days time. Sometimes people post op runs for almost 2 weeks later than that lol

I remember quite a few from the early 2000s. One of the regions most infamous of course would be January 26, 1967. Record temperatures in the 60s immediately preceded the record storm.

It is such a mess outside with the frozen ground and melting snow. There are literally sheets of consolidated ice with water on top of them. We've not had bare ground in about a month and even then the ground was already frozen. I'm really hoping we can avoid the heaviest rain. The one good thing is it does appear to be a break between the rain and the Winter part of the storm as temperatures fall below freezing. By the time the 2nd round of precipitation starts, whether it starts a snow or briefly begins a sleet or freezing rain, temperatures should already be in the 20s.

Same

That's what was so amazing about 2013 14. I mean don't get me wrong we still get snow on top of snow many times but it's usually a different ball game to get snow on top of deep snow.

There does appear to be a several hour break between the rain and the wintry aspect of the system here

I never want snow to melt but in the circumstances of this case I wish it would just continue to go because I want as little standing water as possible for the freeze up before the snow starts lol.

February has also had unusually deep snow many of those years. Then March gets ZZZ. We have had a number of snowy November's and April's and zzzz December's and marches. But February is rocking

It's going...just very slowly lol

Howling south winds, 46, and the snowpack still holding.

The past 20 years, with a few exceptions, Feb has been money.

Wind Advisory Flood Watch Winter Storm Watch All in effect

The depth is 3 to 4" but you have to realize the water content in it is a lot. I took this picture on Saturday after the last thaw but before the fresh snow on Sunday. The frost depth is about 2 feet so the ground is frozen solid. Huge water Laden ice snowbanks everywhere too. There's really no water where for the water to run off.

That's DTX. Very gunshy on watches and warnings but they'll issue an advisory all day. Sometimes to where I think it makes the public complacent. Some of their advisories I feel are not even needed, a special weather statement would suffice, and other advisories should be warnings and are often upgraded midway through the storm lol.

Sometimes it's about impact. Look at all the car pile ups on Sunday in the whiteouts. This storm should have a high impact regardless due to the icy conditions. Snow amounts however are a huge unknown so they might as well just forecast 1 to 8" and see what happens. I wish I could avoid looking at computer models but i can't help myself. Weather does what it wants. Like I said a few weeks ago, the day I enjoy an overperforming 3" snowfall more than I do an underperforming 9" snowfall is the day I quit following the weather and just turn to following computers. And that's not happening.

That's crazy that some areas had a top 10 or 15 driest year on record last year. I did not realize it was THAT dry so. Been a pretty average Winter here snowwise to date (may change to the + by Friday) and 2021 was Detroit's 12th wettest year on record.

We have actually had quite a few snow events this season that have overperformed, and most of the rest have performed as expected. Only the 1 big one was the one that really underperformed, and it had the most hype. This storm has a massive amount of uncertainty. Either way I don't see how it's not going to be a high impact event. You have frozen solid ground with snowcover that is going to be melting with heavy rain, then a transition to ice and snow and a major temp plummet to the single digits in the storms wake.

And sref (ie nam ensembles) went well south lol.