frostfern

Bring it. The roads need a good cleaning from the salt and sand residue.

It looks like more of a lake-enhanced event here, but the air aloft is not very cold due to the PV being well north. Good clippers this late in the season around here need to have much steeper lapse rates. The GFS has a better front-end thump a couple days later, but ECMWF has nothing as of now.

That's accurate. Really got screwed by the sharp cutoff.

That map smoothed out the northwest gradient or something. There wasn't over 6 inches here. It was 4.5. It was mostly dusty little flakes so it's not very high ratio.

Its currently drizzling here. Virga hole on radar. Dry layer between 5k and 10k feet needs to fill in before returns can reach the ground.

I think the 8" on the ground was still fairly fresh. There was no intermediate thaw. It makes sense the drifts were huge with 27 inches of powder being blown around by blizzard force winds.

67 was epic in the I-94 corridor. My parents weren't living in Michigan then though. They only remember Jan 78.

Hope you get your big dog total. Yesterday I was expecting a goose egg IMBY.

I don't know how many people who post are old enough to remember 1978. I always see these pictures of what looks like three feet of snow and drifts up to the roofs of cars but it seems misleading. My folks don't remember the details, but they seem to imply that there was a already a decent amount of snow on the ground before the storm. It would be like if you combined the constant clipper trains of Jan/Feb 2014 with GHD 1. GHD 1 happened after a cold and dry January with otherwise below normal snowfall. I imagine if there was already quite a bit of snow on the ground that was still powdery enough to blow and added whatever 12-18" fell in that particular storm you'd get those kind of drifts you see in pictures that give the illusion it snowed 6 feet. People you talk to still seem to think it snowed 2 feet in that storm when in reality it didn't. It never has snowed 2 feet in 24 hours.

Midnight to midnight is a weirdly arbitrary figure though. I'd just like to see the number of times an accumulation over 12" happens in any 24 hour period. GHD 1 was the last event I can recall that pulled that off in GRR. It gets rare as soon as you get east of the major NW flow lake effect belts. Biggest totals here are mostly synoptic / lake-effect combos that occur over a 48-72 hour period. It's just not the same as when it comes down heavy all at once. GHD 1 was special because the bulk of it came down in under 12 hours with a lot of wind to push it around. Closest thing I've seen to something you would see on the east coast.

It's not fall though. It's been below freezing for weeks. The ground is frozen solid most places. Existing puddles will only make it more icy when the changeover happens.

Thank you. So I'm guessing that on the northwest end the dry layer that needs to saturate will be mostly between 850 and 700. The lakes should help keep it moist below 850. I noticed last year on the northern fringe of storms there was this big jump in totals going from the east to the west side of Lake Michigan. It wasn't necessarily classical lake enhancement either, just quicker onset due to virga reduction. You could even see it in the radar data aloft. In this case it definitely helps starting out on the warm side of the front as the incoming low-level arctic layer has to interact with the lakes more on the way in as the warm sector boundary layer is pushed out. The caveat is a low inversion height will allow a dry layer above 5000 feet to impede some.

Weenie prayers.

It's all about choosing the right model. Kind of like elections are about finding the votes to put you over the top.

I will pray. There is still old snow on the ground but the thaw tomorrow will do a number on it.

Its the LLJ from the northern stream low heading up into Canada. It would be one thing if that low was farther north than modeled, but stronger is probably detrimental.

Seems like it would take this kind of anomalous gulf moisture + arctic front, but with an actual bomb cyclone rather than this sloppy open wave. A deeper low would hook north and take the heavy snow north with it.

Even if the models get the positioning of synoptic features correct, the positioning of snow bands is hard to predict. If the frontal zone aloft is mostly stationary throughout the event the same heavy bands may persist over some areas more than others within the same general swath. Will be interesting if there ends up being a narrow band of really extreme totals in some places.

I bet the initial snow with the developing frontal zone will be somewhat convective. I sharp arctic airmass pushing in will sometimes do that. There may be some banded variability of totals within the bigger swath.

Now it's looking more like two separate events here. FGEN bands immediately behind the cold front, then a big break, then the snow shield from the new wave riding up the front. If it models shift it all southeast again I'm totally out of the picture.

It's just my own personal anecdotal experience that systems with a lot of front-loaded overrunning snow don't produce super high ratios regardless of how cold the column is. I don't know why, but the flakes are just different. Usually a lot of less intricate plates that don't aggregate as well as pure dendrites. I just prefer to know the actual amount of water being put out. 15:1 is usually the best it gets. I have never seen higher ratios except from clippers and lake effect.

This isn't a clipper so the Kuchera Ratio is probably overblowing the totals.

F off with that.

Lock it in please.

The weird thing about the '13/'14 winter here was there was only one double digit event in a 24 hour period. There was a lake-enhanced clipper that dumped 11" in a 24 hour period. The rest was all 2-5" per day for several days in a row style events, due to good synoptic+lake effect combos. The thing is it started in December and lasted into March. There were a few brief rainy thaws, but when it was cold it was almost always snowing. Starting in early February with little to zero snow pack it will take several blizzards to even get close.