hawkeye_wx

The Euro is also showing this weekend system. If this verifies, folks from Iowa to Michigan would be stuck in the 30s and 40s with rain/mix and wind.

We may be done with the real cold stuff, but models are not very pretty for the lakes region the rest of the month. We get a warm day Wednesday, with a high in the 70s, and Thursday should be solid, but then it kinda turns kinda lousy again. The GFS and Euro both show a similar pattern... general wnw/nw flow, with disturbances riding southeast like clippers and then amping up as they turn east into the Ohio Valley. Farther into the lakes, like Michigan, you don't even get the brief midweek warmth. The Euro has you in 40s and 50s for the next ten days. Yuck.

That's a great photo. It reminds me of the movie 'Runaway Train'.

Man, this one is the textbook definition of a stat-padder. We picked up 3.5" of snow between midnight and 6am, while I slept, there was zero accumulation on the pavement, so no cleanup at all, and the snow will be totally gone by 1pm.

I forgot to mention that my 3.5" of snow had only 0.28" of liquid in it, so the ratio is 12.5 to 1. That's pretty good for mid April. It certainly helped that my area had perfect timing. All of our snow fell from 12-6am.

My 3.5" of snow will be gone in a few hours.

Good overperformer around here. I picked up 3.5". We only expected 1-2. Iowa City got 6". This heavy snow is really caked on the trees. There is a decent branch broken off of one of my trees.

Radar shows a batch of heavy snow moving into Cycloneland.

3-5" in south-central Iowa and the storm really hasn't even started, yet? *sigh* The Des Moines NWS was only expecting an inch or less. My biggest snowfall this winter was only 4.x" and it takes the world's biggest storm just to drop 8 inches here.

12z Canadian

Even this weak, barely-mentioned system was able to drop 3-4" from southeast of Des Moines to the QC. Radar was fairly impressive down there, but I didn't expect 4" totals. I did not get into the good stuff, but a temp in the upper 20s helped us get 0.4".

The 00z Euro is, once again, stronger and farther north compared to its previous run.

3k NAM isn't quite as far north.

My 2-day rain total from this system is 0.78". We won't be seeing 60º again for a while.

It's too bad this system is moving through the region in split form. Instead of one powerhouse low, we get a northern piece and southern piece.

We had a pretty nice morning, rising into the 50s, but an afternoon washout produced 0.45" of rain and dropped us into the upper 40s.

Cedar Rapids has gusted to 60 mph late this afternoon.

Assuming the track is close to what models are currently showing, weatherbo is going to be crushed.

The 12z Euro inched back nw a bit with the snow. For southeast Iowa over to Chicago, the northern wave is a bit too far nw and the southern wave a bit too far se. The waves don't fully phase until it's past us. Here in the middle we get some rain and then end with some light snow.

Yeah, models show a ton of deep convection down south. That is rarely good for us.

That's a mean cell nw of Indy... some big hail for sure.

4" size hail reported in far southeast Iowa. Yikes!

Monday and Tuesday could be pretty brutal for mid April. It looks like a mid-winter map.

I just experienced two rounds of hail up to 5/8" diameter. It was fun to see that again because we just don't get much hail here and rarely larger than pea size. We got lucky as the two large hail cores missed just north and south.