Category: Snow Southwest Michigan

Winter Weather Expected Over Most of Lower Michigan Friday!

The National Weather Service offices across the western Great Lakes have all issued Winter Weather Advisories for this snowfall event that is expected to continue, even over Iowa into northern Illinois and Wisconsin into early Friday afternoon and over Lower Michigan into the early evening of Friday.

The following slides will show you the details of this event that is expected to bring up to 10″ of snow in about 12 hours to some locations in western Great Lakes. It will likely be the heaviest snowfall over most of the area since mid February.

Snow Expected over Wisconsin and Michigan late Thursday into Friday.

A narrow band of snowfall greater than 6″ in 12 hours is expected about 100 miles north of the track of the surface low. That would be near or just north of I-96 in Michigan. Snowfall rates in the heaviest snow area will be high enough to accumulate during the daytime, even in late March.

What Happened to Our Cold Winters of the Past?

At least over Southwest Michigan and likely most of the northern CONUS, we have lacked cold winter (relative to 1991-2020 normal) since the winter of 2014/2015, which was the last cold winter. I would suggest warming oceans are at least part of the story.

Unusually Warm into Friday, then over the next week, the colder air returns over most of the CONUS.

This past 15 days ( Jan. 23- Feb. 7) in Grand Rapids, Michigan were the warmest on record (34.8F) that exceeded the 34.7F for the 15 days ending on January 6th 2012.

It will be unusually warm till next weekend. Then the cold and snow return. This time the cold will not move out as quickly as it did in January.

The bottom line is it will be very warm, relative to normal until around Valentine’s Day, the it will get cold across most of the central and eastern CONUS with a significant amount of snow over the Great Lakes and New England.