Winter up north

For MPR listeners up north it's been quite a weekend!

A slow moving storm which brought rain to the Twin Cities and southern Minnesota has dumped up to 2 FEET of snow in the north.

Check out these amazing snow totals!

Snowfall from the Duluth NWS

Snowfall from the Grand Forks NWS

Hang in there, a big change and warm up is on the way by the weekend!

PH

The 2 foot storm totals are impressive, but how are you counting that? Is it anything like the 8+ inches you reported for New Brighton last week? The snow on my New Brighton lawn was never more than 2-3" deep and the slush on the road even less.

Hi Al:

Thanks for the comment!

All snowfall measurements we report are taken by NWS personell or trained weather observers.

Accumulations are measured prior to melting that may occur on the ground. The point is to meausre how much has fallen from the atmosphere, not what conditions may cause melting at ground level.

Here's a great link that explains how to measure snow.

http://ccc.atmos.colostate.edu/~hail/howto/help/snow.htm

PH

Thanks, Paul. I figured the reported totals were due to the measurement method, which doesn't seem to work well for the type of precipitation. It seemed like a lot of hype during the last storm because no meteorologist I heard mentioned that those depths were never seen on the ground at any one time.