hawkeye_wx

I woke up to 3.4", about what was expected from the intial heavy batch. As the mid-level energy slowly moves in from the west, snow is once again expanding across Iowa. Models suggest another few inches for Cedar Rapids. South of I-80 may actually get a bit screwed by the dry slotting.

4-6+" of snow has fallen in the greater Des Moines area in only three hours tonight.

12z Euro

12z UK

I'm going with 4" in Cedar Rapids.

The 12z euro has really amped up the Wednesday midwest storm. Of course, it's dropping another several+ inches across much of Iowa. It is an epic period for Iowa snow geeks(unless you live in Sioux City). The only thing that is lacking is real biggie storms.

The 00z Euro did come back southeast with the heart of the snow, so a wide swath of Iowa gets a solid 3-6".

I'm interested in seeing if the euro continues to shift the best precip into n/nw Iowa, or rejoin the rest of the models.

Nah. It's still the heart of winter. "Go big or go home" season is March. "Go home" season is April.

Today's big warmup unfortunately melted a few inches of snow, but it made it possible to finally get all the thick ice off the streets, driveways, and sidewalks. That stuff sucked.

We're going to need a nice snowfall this weekend just to get back what we're losing today.

We've surged into the mid 40s here in the city... way higher than originally expected.

I measured 6.9" a couple hours ago from about 0.90" precip. We are currently receiving more bands of light to moderate snow on the backside, which will push me over 7". The wettest models were correct about the qpf. The GFS and Euro were way too dry and way underdid the warm nose surge. I would have received 9-10" without the mixing. The wind is whipping now and blowing the top layer of snow around. I finally got my 6" storm. I think we've had four winter storm warnings this year. This is the first one that verified.

The back edge of the snow/mix line has quickly surged northeast through Cedar Rapids/Iowa City, so we are back to snow. Much of the heavier precip is done, though. Radar shows a lot of dry pockets to the sw. It might be a struggle to get the additional 1.5" of snow needed to reach 6" for the event.

It's pretty crazy how something always seems to go wrong for Cedar Rapids. It's a real struggle just to get a 6" snowstorm here. 6" just isn't that much, but it is here. This one finally looked like a sure thing, but nope.

Cedar Rapids is now received a mix of sleet and freezing rain.

My total is 4.5" and it will only rise very slowly for a while as the mix moves in.

The mix crap has surged into Cedar Rapids, something I did not expect at all. Our 1"/hr snowfall rate earlier has turned to garbage as the snow has turned into sleetish chunky flakes. We can probably knock the 8-9" forecast down to 6-7".

2.3" here so far, 1+"/hr rate.

Large flakes ripping in Iowa City. Radar shows pretty heavy snow over the area.

Light snow has begun to fall in Cedar Rapids.

The heavy snow band is pretty thin down here in Iowa before the system wraps up and becomes much more widespread in Wisconsin.

I'm going with 5 inches for Cedar Rapids. The qpf range is 0.50-0.90", with the euro down to ~0.62". We've had a forecast calling for 6-8" a few times this year, but each time we only received 3-5". I'm hoping the ratio won't be as lousy this time.

You can bet the Quad Cities will report at least 6 inches again. Over here we have a decent shot at our first 6" snowfall of the season.

00z euro Western Iowa up to Minneapolis have really had the rug pulled out from under them this evening.