Storm Watch

Greetings and welcome!

10pm

There is a lot of snow out there. My guess is that there is 10-12″ down, and it is heavy stuff.

My four tape measures elude me at the moment so I have to guess at the snow depth. The TV was on board with my 10-12″ guess. It said that High Fall Reservoir had 10″ and Townsend had 12″.

The snow was made heavy by occasional drizzle and light rain mixing in over the course of the day. My snowblower and plow truck will be working hard tomorrow.

There is something to be said for taking the snow away in several passes in big storms. I declined to do that today. The thinking was that the rain behind the snow would be a lot easier to deal with as really heavy snow than ice on a plowed road. I am not sure if that was a good call or not. My equipment will be well challenged by a foot of wet heavy snow with rain in it.

The storm is still grinding away to our southwest. We are in a dry slot at the moment, but there are more plumes of moisture heading this way. I do expect more rain and snow overnight.

Here are some pictures from 10pm. Note the arrow. I had to kick away snow from the bottom of the car door to get it open. Some was drifting, but the snow was pretty deep.

I will follow up again tomorrow.

BTW.. the whitewater rafting on the Peshtigo will be amazing this weekend. The river went up to +30″ today. That is really big.

RJB

1:30pm

We are under a winter weather advisory here in Silver Cliff. A few miles to the west Forest Co is under a winter storm warning.

This storm has been a strange one. The radar showed that it started snowing in our area about midnight last night. We must have had some dry air over us because the snow just wasn’t getting here. The radar showed it moving our way and getting close but it would evaporate right over us and leave us clear of the snow on radar.

Once the snow on the radar did get over our area it still didn’t snow. It showed it snowing over us for much of the night. Imagine my surprise when I looked out of the window at sunrise and there was not a speck of snow, rain, or anything.

Well all of that went away at 7am. The snow started and it has been pretty vigorous since then. I went outside and measured about 6″ down as of 1pm, and it is snowing pretty good.

We are in the 5-8″ band for snowfall, and the TV says that we could see 1/4-1/2″ of ice accumulation from freezing rain late today into tonight. The good news in all of that is that the prediction has dropped for the 1/2″ to the 1/4″ of ice as the day has progressed.

There is a major plume of moisture heading this way on the radar. Will it be rain, freezing rain, or a whole bunch more snow? I will find out in a couple of hours.

This storm kind of spared us by moving north a couple of states west of here instead of over us. Out in MN and South Dakota this is a major major blizzard and a real disaster. What we have is bad enough, but it could have been a LOT worse.

Speaking of heavy snow, I took a road trip west and north of here yesterday. In my 60 mile round trip I counted 11 buildings either crushed completely or had the roofs caved in. There were a couple of garden sheds, and old shacks, but some were garages and big pole barns. It was a bad winter for a lot of people.

Anyway.. I will be back later with a storm update. Have a good Thursday and thank you for visiting!

RJB