We had one heck of a messy system in the area Monday and Tuesday, going from rain to snow. A strong winter storm system moved across the Upper Midwest bringing significant snows to Northern Minnesota while the warm side hit Western Wisconsin. The low past pretty much directly over the area, as it did it drew up warm air, temperatures remained steadily in the mid to upper 30s even at night! when preicp started to fall it came down as primarily rain over most of the area, but far Northwest sections of the area mainly on Western Burnett County had enough cold air to work with near the end of the storm that they got up to 5 inches!
Moderate rain November 29th
although at my location it went exactly in this order. It was 39.F and started off as moderate rain Monday afternoon then changed to heavy snow for about 45 minutes when the temp dropped to 34.F it quickly accumulated to a quarter inch, then went back to moderate rain for the remainder of Monday night when the temp rose back up to 35.F I got 0.21″ of rain.
Moderate snow early the 30th
After the moderate rain preicp then made a transition back to heavy snow once again early Tuesday morning around 12AM when the temp was 35.F before dropping. It remained snow after this change-over, I picked up a storm total of 2.50″ During the rain and warm temperatures the snow shrunk from 5.50″ on Friday to 3″ with brown spots showing up in parts of the lawn. There were many times when I thought the snow would completely melt, but Tuesday morning cold air came back in just in time and snow began re filling those spots and we never lost our snowcover completely. At the end of the snow the snowpack was back up to 4 inches. Finally arctic fluff continued to fall through Tuesday and Wednesday this accumulated to about 1.50″ of my snow total. I remember talking to Josh of the Oshkosh,WI blog how we both thought the that my snow would melt off and it would not be the sticking winter snowpack, but so far we’ve had a steady completely snowcover at least over 3″ since November 13th!
Snow totals varied greatly over the local area, from up to 5 inches in Western Burnett county where Grantsburg and Danbury reported 5 inches, to a Trace in Menomonie in Dunn county. There was a sharp cut off in the snow totals, where is seems like an around south of a line from Osceola to Clayton to Cameron barely had anything at all for snow