Today (Christmas Eve), a burst of heavy snow moved in this morning with an accelerating surface low near Bloomington, IL tracking northeast toward Chicago, IL. This was the heaviest the snow fell in a two-day period of snowfall here in Kewanee, IL as expected. As temperatures hovered around 32 degrees this morning it allowed for very low liquid-snow ratios on the order of 10:1 and with good upward vertical motion present the snowflakes were "half-dollar" size for a time. This was due to the all important -15C isotherm allowing for dendritic growth to occur with very good omega in the optimum growth layer as supercooled water droplets collide with ice crystals thanks to aggregation. This allows for the snowflakes to become very large and accumulate rapidly. Here are a couple images from this mornings snow "event".
So total snow/sleet from this storm was on track with myself picking up around 3" of snow with a good 1" of sleet on top of that. Now it's time to melt all of this. This weekend a powerful storm system will move in allowing for strong WAA over our snow pack. This will melt that snow pack in earnest over the next few days and we could be near 50 this weekend. Crazy right? What's even more crazy is we'll be dealing with flooding rains and even thunderstorms after weeks of brutal cold and snowstorms. After that the pattern finally switches to more of a zonal-flow finally. That's all for now, maybe I'll be chasing a thunderstorm this weekend eh? Happy Holidays or Merry Christmas whichever you prefer!
