It was a lovely little snowfall!

I think they may have a 12 step program for this

Hopefully it won't be dry

Yeah, it definitely snowed and accumulated while the winds were onshore, and my belief is that it was helped out by the prolonged much below average temperatures prior to the storm. A portion of the snow would've occurred after winds shifted offshore, but obviously it's impossible to say how much since we are talking about 1895, so no hourly obs to look at. The daily weather map from 8 am on November 25 depicts it snowing in Chicago at that time. I found an old Chicago Tribune article from November 26, 1895 that described the events of the previous day, and it mentioned there being a few inches of snow in the morning. Then it seems to have mixed with rain or sleet for a while, turning the streets very slushy per the description in the article, before turning to all snow again. It was a wet snow, at least on the 25th, and it mentioned that many wires were knocked down. Not sure why the data for Harrison doesn't show anything on the 26th. Have you checked COOPs from around there? Sometimes they are funky. I looked at Detroit and it seems like they got a good amount of precip on the 26th, though they were mostly on the warm side of the storm.

I don't know if others feel this way, but I get really sick of the PSL interface and just making one map at a time. So I made some code that you can put into google colab. It allows you to set up your parameters via function arguments and you can select a range of years and get individual plots for all those years. It lets you do composite plots too but what I really had in mind was if you wanted to say, look at 50 hPa heights for December for the last 50 years. You can do it quickly. It will just get you 50 maps in like 45 seconds. It's just for Anomaly plots. Anyway, I can't guarantee it won't break. But it seemed to work for what I tested. Anyway, I know a lot of you make these plots so maybe this helps somebody. There are some commented out examples at the bottom. psl_code.txt Anyway, the reason why I made that is I wanted to look at the polar vortex position in relation to the winter. I see two current paths in model guidance. The AIFS camp that wants to keep the PV over Canada and the GEFS camp that moves it further east. Here are some matches I found. With that said, the group I grabbed for 50 hPa look colder than current guidance for mid month. So maybe my composite wasn't so great or maybe it'll trend colder at some point. Not sure. Looking ahead, the central Canada centered PV case rolls forward to a cold eastern half of the country in Jan-Feb. Not surprising given the analog years I found. It's similar in the PV-east case, but January is warmer. Maybe this is all garbage. But the thing that has caught my attention is the PV being displaced south over Canada. It just makes the cold more available and its probably why so many of the similar PV years were cold. I am not sure I buy it being as cold as these show to be honest and maybe by late December it'll be different enough that this analysis didn't mean anything. Time will tell of course.