A Winter Weather Advisory goes into effect at midnight from southwest Iowa into north-central and a Winter Weather Warning for southern and southeast Iowa.
National Weather Service meteorologist Andrew Ansorge says things are setting up for a big snow dump. “There’s a lot of moisture overrunning a frontal zone well to the south of the state and as the moisture moves up and over Iowa it’s encountering the cold air and it’ll be falling out of snow so that’s where we’re going to see a widespread snowfall, and the highest snowfall amounts for this storm will be across southern Iowa and northern Missouri where snow amounts of six to eight maybe even nine inches across parts of northern Missouri will be possible,” Ansorge says.
Parts of northern Iowa got snow in the first round last night. Ansorge says round three will come at the end of the week. “We were looking at that moving in sometime later on Friday, through the day Saturday,” he says. “Kind of still too early on snow amounts, but maybe definitely looks like a lighter snowfall, maybe of two to four inches.”
State Climatologist Justin Glisan says we’ve been in a snow drought across the state with anywhere from 14 to 22 inches below average for this season, and January was about six inches below average. But Glisan says the weather pattern could see February beat the snowfall average. “We’re in a weak La Nina winter, which generally if you look back at snowfall behavior for weak La Ninas, we generally see anywhere from four to six inches of above average snowfall in winter,” he says.
Glistan says February has shown that pattern recently. “You know, looking at recent Februarys, we’ve actually seen slightly slightly more snowfall. We’ve had more arctic air outbreaks, we’ve had more snowfall events. So there is a potential to get more snowfall in February,” Glisan says. He says March also has the potential to bring more snow and catch up some on the winter total.
(Pat Powers, KQWC, also contributed to this story)