Today I used the NAM 3km forecast since that now goes out, hour by hour to 8 pm on Monday. I hope tomorrow evening to update with the HREF, which I still believe is most reliable for cloud cover forecasting.
As for the best location to see the Eclipse,for those in this area, I would say anywhere along the track form Evansville Indiana to near Cleveland. Most of the models continue to favor this area .
This was both nationally and locally one of the warmest winters on record, with records going back to 1895. Nationally and locally snowfall was below to well below normal. Precipitation was mostly near normal.
For Southwest Michigan, this was the warmest February on record. Both the total precipitation and snowfall were well below normal. Nationally this was the 3rd warmest and 40th driest on record.
There was a narrow band of 5″ to 8″ of snow From Near Holland Michigan, across the Grand Rapids area, to just north of Flint. Most of the snow fell in about 12 hours.
This is an update to what I did yesterday but with a lot more detail. I have added CONUS scale winter temperature anomalies for each of the past 10 years so you can see for yourself, in your area how the cold winter frequency has changed (there is a summary CONUS scale summary table for this now too). I have added correlation slides from CPC and Physical Science Laboratories to show there really the correlation I am suggesting is true.
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.
Record high temperatures ( many cases all time record highs for February) were quickly brought to an end by a strong late February cold front. There were 21 reported tornadoes, mostly EF-0 and EF-1 but there was an EF-2 near Grand Blanc in Geneses County just ahead of the cold front. Temperatures fell around 50 degrees between Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday afternoon over Lower Michigan. There was 6 to 10 inches of snow in upper Michigan and locally 1 to 2 inches of rain in parts of southern Lower Michigan. Winds gusted to 69 mph over western Lake Erie.
Largely this means warmer and wetter over the CONUS but cold and snowy over southern Canada.
themarinocast 