brianc400

Yes, he is my blood brother.

The winds weakened considerably before it moved into my part of lake county IL. I lost power with the first gusts, but I don’t have even a small branch down from my willow trees.

I just heard from my brother Hawkeye. It’s a war zone! Sustained 55-60 winds for 20 minutes. Some 90-100mph gusts and many 70+. Trees, shrubs down. He lost much of his fence. Garden is destroyed. And it’s continuing unabated. Just amazing.

Maybe, but I might like to see the storm actually take place before calling any winners. Struggling to recall more than one small storm in my area this year where even the NowCast wasn’t a bust.

0.7” is my total in my area. But it looks like the machine is turning in just north of me. Let’s see!

I was skeptical of band swinging around from the north, but in the end I pricked up another 1.5” of beautiful, large flake moderate snow in Lake Co and actually had some work to do to clean up. It was too heavy to push 2” across my wide drive without regretting it later. I’ll take it, as we still have not had a snowfall matching the 3.5” on Halloween.

When the snowflakes last night were the largest I’ve ever seen—some were easily pushing 2.5”—we might have had over an inch. By morning it’s already settled by half. I’ll be surprised if the wraparound band amounts to much today. On the plus sides, it is just beautiful out with snow stuck to every twig.

It’s been sleety rain here for the last hour. The rain has picked up. It will be interesting to see how much effect the warm Lake Michigan has 12 miles west.

I did not put a snowboard out today (oops—too busy thinking about infinity stones) but after some good bouts of heavy snow tracking across the southern half of the county after 4 p.m. with reduced visibility, I have an easy 3+ on grassy areas. I'd like to wish it was 4, but it's too hard to claim that on lush grass.

After 5 minutes of sprinkles, it went straight to snow here in Lake Co.

Buffalo Grove is a few miles SE of me. They must have caught a nice LES plume.

My favorite thing about these calm, longer duration snows is the perfect muffin tops on everything. Second favorite is how easy it is to measure.

I'm happy to be wrong about the LES in my area. I also like picked up another 1.5 overnight. Nice!!

I finished up here at 4.0". The last inch+ was super fluffy. Maybe there's some shot at LES later but it's not so common that it hangs out very long in Lake Co.

2.7" IMBY.

Heaviest band of the day is moving through my area now. Good size flakes and the visibility has dropped to under a quarter mile. I was at 2.5" before this started.

With only a month left, I would not expect any more tweaks. Such tweaks in complex models of any type (economics, social, etc.) do not stand alone. A "fix" to the juiciness here has some effect in other aspects of the model, perhaps not even directly related to the QPF. It might be easier or more likely for the forecasters to mentally adjust the suggestion of the model, or to simply favor other models for the amount of moisture.

It's icing up quickly in my area. Roads are mostly ok but slow. But any untreated surfaces are solidly glazed over. The rain was mixed just enough with ice pellets to give a little texture.

This is not unusual in ultra cold weather. The switches freeze. Here is a good article from a few years back: https://www.wired.com/2014/02/fire-on-tracks/

3.5" in my yard when I left the house at 5:30. Nowhere near the 6-9" warning criteria that caused cancelled schools. Some schools around here did late start instead. That looks smart in hindsight, especially since we can expect a couple of days cancelled for the cold this week.

On one hand, bring on the heavier snow. Go globals! On the other hand, I have to drive in this around 6 am so would definitely prefer the RAP and HRRR.

I have 3" at my place. We started out as all snow last night. It's a winter wonderland, stuck to all the branches.

LOT radar flared up out of nowhere in the last hour. Already reports of freezing rain and auto crashes.

It continued snowing for half the morning, and I ended up with 6.25. Not bad! It will be interesting what LES amounts to here. East-west roads in the open areas are starting to drift quite a bit already.