Parts of the tri states region received a substantial amount of snow during this week's winter storm. But snow amounts varied widely depending on the location.
“What made the storm remarkable is that unlike a typical storm, where there’s a wide swath of snow that spreads well into the cold air, in this case the stripe of heaviest snows was fairly narrow,” said Andy Ervin, a senior meteorologist with the National Weather Service in the Quad Cities.
He said that happened because the storm had a lot of moisture that stayed confined very close to a front.
He said typically the transitional area from heavy snow to no snow might be 100 or more miles wide. That was not the case this time around.
“You could have really ridden a bicycle from almost no snow on the ground to a foot. In theory, that would have been in some cases only about 15 to 30 miles difference,” Ervin said.
He said most of Iowa received no snow at all, with just the far southeast tip of the state receiving more than an inch, while Macomb – just a short drive away – had about a foot of snow reported.
Ervin said the forecast originally called for two waves of moisture along the front. The first wave hit west central Illinois but the second wave passed just to the south. That’s why the weather service shortened the winter storm warning by 24 hours – it ended at 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday instead of Thursday.
Ervin said the snow now on the ground should help keep cold temperatures in place for a bit.
“It does not look like we’re going to melt off any time soon. So we have at least a couple weeks of dealing with this snow on the ground,” he said.
The agency expects very cold conditions to continue through Friday night before temperatures rise a bit, though they will remain below freezing. No precipitation is in the forecast through the middle of next week.
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