January 26-27: What happened?

For those of you who regularly view this site for weather information (and I thank you), you might be wondering just what went wrong. Why did we get so much snow Wednesday morning when none was in the forecast? Why did we get so much more snow at night then was forecasted?

Snowstorms are notoriously tricky to forecast, and this one was more difficult than normal. To put it very simply, the weather forecasting models simply did not do a good job of handling this storm. Let's start with the morning snow, which caught so many by suprise. The forecast on this site, and all other forecasts I saw, either called for little or no precipitation at all for Wednesday morning. Computer models were surprisingly in good agreement leading into that period - basically the quantitative precipation models for the morning were dry! Precipitation was supposed to be light if any fell at all. And yet, most of the area received 3-5 inches of morning snow. It is hard to explain this failure except to say that an area of moisture can often precede the main center of the storm, and given the already cold air in place, a great deal of snow fell.

As far the later snow (the image above shows the total snowfall, courtesy of the Jeff Masters blog on the Weather Underground site www.wunderground.com), we clearly got much more snow than expected. As the storm deepened and colder air was brought in, the snow to liquid ratio quickly got larger, and strong bands of snow developed over our area, similar to December 26th's storm. As you can see, our area was literally the middle of the bullseye. Again, the models just did not see this coming. It is possible, as is mentioned in the above blog, that an overall climatic warming might actually lead to heavier snows, as slightly warmer area can handle more moisture. So we might be in for more extreme storms.

We still can only forecast based on the scientific data available, and none really got this one right. But I will keep at it and always try my best to provide you with up-to-date information.