michsnowfreak

My favorite storm. 16.7" at Detroit, 18" on the ground...Nice deep snowpack was put in place for the record cold month that would follow.

The grinch storm temp gradient was insane. Christmas was our coldest day of this mild winter (upper teens/low 20s and 3.6" snow)...frost in Florida...60s in Maine.

gfs is especially bad for a lot of the lake effect/lake enhanced events we get in Michigan. it will show a generic blob of precip and good luck even getting an idea where the best bands are (hi res is better but not fool proof)

its still.south though.

Seems to be a decent amount of activity on the ensembles in the longrange. Naturally everything is all over the place, but it seems to be a sign that our zzzz period is on life support.

When does sampling begin?

That Winter a practically clear sky could produce a snowstorm.

powder and fluff settles/compacts a lot unfortunately. The one down side to it.

I notice that DTX always plays things very conservative when they are in the long range and keeps things very vague until closer to the event

The orientation of the euro reminds me of a slightly farther north version of Feb 1-2, 2015. 18.0" at Chicago and 16.7" at Detroit

The euro is a little far North for my liking but considering the more suppressed Canadian, icon, and UK, can't say that I mind it. only the gfs isn't playing ball.

Is this supposed to be one elongated system or several low pressures?

picked up 1.1" here and at DTW. The heavy band in Detroit's northern suburbs drops 2.5 to 3" in a narrow swath and there was another band of around 2" near Monroe. Most of the rest of the area got around an inch give or take. It's also a dry fluffy snow which settles fast, again in contrast many of our lower ratio snows of this season. It did present a perfect photo opportunity for my Christmas trees that are sitting on the curb awaiting recycling

I never took the sun angle into consideration.

oh wow. sounds like a tundra winter. We had a very prolonged period of double digit snowpack, considering it was nonstop blowing and drifting and settling it really kept up.

you were the jackpot area. snowing nice here.

That is a cool website. I personally have compiled things like that for Detroit but it's very rare to see a national weather service compile that much detail of stats, let alone the dnr. I just used Xmacis and it calculated the data from 1900 to 2020 period I do not have snow cover data for Minneapolis from 1884 to 1900. I like Xmacis because as long as there is no missing data you can get the exact averages of whatever your looking for, no quality control or anything. The bottom line is, 88 or 100 days it really does not matter, for a snow cover lover Minneapolis is one of the best metros to live in in this sub. Considering the long term average is only 6" more snowfall than Detroit but 38 more days of 1" snow cover, I would say Minneapolis does an excellent job of making their snow last.

MKE averages 60 days per season of 1"+ snowcover. The most was 117 days in 1978-79 and the least 17 days in 1953-54. Side note....its crazy how many anemic winters there were in the 1930s-50s in this region. I've said it many times regarding Detroit but as I look at other areas I see a lot of the same. Whether it was warm winters, low snow winters, or both, some of them were terrible everywhere, while others were bad in some spots and serviceable in others. There were a few good region wide winters thrown in there but they were few and far between during that era.

I am terrible at reading those type of maps for what they mean at the surface but I know extended runs have definitely shown a lot of abnormal cold in Canada for February. Someone mentioned that the split polar vortex cold will now be on our side of the globe in February where currently it's on the other side. Take it all for what it's worth and we all know how bad LR models can be but honestly February does not have a bad look for being a wintry month in our sub. If it does get very cold hopefully we can get into a clippery pattern and the ice fisherman can have their fun but I have a feeling that what some to our Southeast considerate "dumpster fire" could actually mean less cold with lots of storminess in our neck of the woods. Anomalous cold is not as important up here as it is down there for snowstorms.

As mentioned above, I am not sure though 100 number comes from everything I looked at showed an average of 88 days for Minneapolis. Obviously it's still double Chicago. As for 2014, im shocked the snow depth with that low in Chicago. I know others have complained about measuring at ORD, I wonder if it was too low? Detroit spent the entire months of both Feb 2014 and Feb 2015 with double digit depth. Each year it lingered well into March as well.

Snowy night here as well

Wouldnt the negative NAO also make liquid precipitation less likely? Still 5 days out and a lot of model runs to go.

The average for Minneapolis looks to be 88 snow cover days per season (1"+). The record is 137 days set twice, in 1964-65 and 2000-01. The record least amount is 26 days in 1930-31. At Chicago the average snow cover days per season is 43. The record is 98 days set in 1978-79 and the record low is 9 days set in 1948-49. At Detroit the average snow cover days per season is 50. The record is 96 days set in 2013-14 and the record low is 10 days set in 1936-37. Note that these are days with 1" or more of snow cover. This does not include days where trace of snow cover is reported, which adds quite a few additional days for each location per season

it seems like this could either help or hurt lol

Don't have my averages right here, but since 2007-08 Detroit is Dec: 9.7" (less than 1" more than avg) Jan: 14.7" (approx 4" more than avg) Feb: 17.8" (approx 8" more than avg)