Nearly three weeks into spring, a winter storm is moving into Iowa this afternoon and tonight, with the potential to dump five-to-nine inches of snow across the northern few tiers of counties. Meteorologist Tiffany Norris says the storm system is arriving from the west and precipitation is already falling.
Norris says snowfall will start this afternoon and into the overnight, which is when it’ll be the heaviest as temperatures fall to around the freezing mark. Norris, who works for Weather Eye, says ground-level temperatures this afternoon will be in the upper 30s and lower 40s, but it’s the air temperature aloft that will cause the precipitation to fall as wet snow.
She says the upper levels have been very cold for the past few weeks, keeping temperatures below normal. Norris says parts of northern Iowa can expect one-to-two inches of mixed precipitation this afternoon, with three-to-five more inches of snow coming overnight. She says this early-spring snowfall isn’t that unusual and this stuff will be hard to shovel.
Norris says it’ll be a wet, slushy, snowball-packing heavy snow, as opposed to the lighter, fluffy snow if it had been very cold and the storm had come from the north. Snowstorms in early April aren’t ever out of the question in Iowa. Four years ago this week, north-central Iowa saw a foot of snowfall on April 7th, followed a week later by near 90-degree temperatures.