Snow, snow, and…snow?

The next several days will be interesting in southeastern Michigan as there will be two rounds of snow and then a chance for a big snowstorm.

The first round of snow will come during the day on Thursday.  A system will drop out of Canada and track through central Michigan during Thursday afternoon into the evening hours.  This system will not be very strong and will not have strong dynamics with it, thus we can only expect 1-2 inches.  The main issue will be the timing of the snowfall which could make the commute home from work tomorrow a bit slow.

 Images courtesy of HPC

The second round of snow will come Friday evening into Saturday morning.  This system will also drop down from Canada, taking a similar path as the first storm.  The difference will be this system will have stronger upper level dynamics that will track right through southeast Michigan, producing a more potent snowstorm.  The only concern is that this storm is expected to be weakening somewhat as it travels through Michigan but not before it produces 2-4 inches of snow, with the higher amounts expected further north.

Images courtesy of HPC

The third and most impressive system is still up in the air because it has a big potential to be a bust.  I won’t bother with going into details until a few more model runs give more of a clue to what can be expected, but as of now it appears that a system will develop somewhere in the lower Mississippi Valley and then either continue staying south before tracking up the East Coast or phase with another area of energy to the north and track to the northeast towards Michigan.  If it were to track to the northeast towards Michigan then this could be a fairly big snowstorm.  This will need to be monitored as it gets closer.

Also, since we’re on the topic of snow…southeast Michigan has only had one snowstorm with 6 or more inches of snow (December 12, 2010), but as of today we’re actually above our average snowfall totals.  For December and January, we average 23 inches of snow, and as of January 26^th, we have 23.7 inches of snow.  So we’re only 0.7 inches above our average with a few days to go before the end of the month.  It is a bit surprising to me, but we have had a lot of couple inches here and there so it makes sense.