Messy system departs, arctic chill returns

All weather is local.

That sage advice came from one of my favorite news directors over three decades in the TV and radio weather business. Localized thunderstorms in the forecast? A perfect forecast for your house when a 15 minute cloudburst opens up at your house. A bust for the guy two streets over who didn't get a drop.

Tuesday's snowfall rode that line. A perfect forecast with several inches of plowable snow for northern Minnesota. A mixed bag of sleet, ice and snow for the Twin Cities metro area, with totals under-performing in most areas.

A metro bust? Probably, on eventual snowfall totals. Not so much if you measure impacts of the combined sleet, ice and snow event.

Plenty of snow up north

The system and forecast snowfall totals verified well for central and northern Minnesota.

A wide swath of two to four inches and counting for the Northland is already down. The eventual forecast totals of 3 to 6 inches look solid up north.

In the metro the mixed bag of sleet, ice and snow materialized as expected. Eventual snowfall totals fell a bit under forecast, but the messy roads made up for that in impact.

The Twin Cities office of the National Weather Service did get reports of thundersnow in the south metro. That's an indication the atmosphere had just enough lift (upward vertical velocity) to produce brief convective snow clusters.

Cold next

This week is a clear reminder that it is still February, and winter in Minnesota.

Our forecast transitions to talk of cold the next few days across Minnesota. A descending dome of semi-arctic high pressure pushes south through Thursday.

Watch the big blue "H" dive south on the surface animation from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Watch the red "L" make another beeline for Boston. Yes, another heavy dumping is on the way for Beantown.

Temperatures tumble accordingly, and another sub-zero morning is on the way for Thursday.

By the way, NOAA's 16-day Global Forecast System output did a solid job of nailing the notion of snowfall today and colder air later this week two weeks ago. Here's a clip from my Updraft post on Jan. 29. NOAA's upgraded GFS 16-day nailed the pattern this week, two weeks ago.

Keep in mind medium-range forecasts two weeks out show much more skill with temperature trends than with precipitation.

Boston strong, and snowy

This is the winter of their discontent in Boston. Jet stream pattern continue to deliver a relentless parade of snowstorms to Beantown. Several snowfall records have fallen already.

Minnesota's Tuesday clipper is about to become Boston's next Thursday weather headache.

With 77 inches of snowfall this season in Boston, there's just not much more room to put all that snow. Local emergency officials are reminding Bostonians to locate and dig out that fire hydrant.

Yes, we're getting off easy this winter in Minnesota.