On Snowfall Click-bait “Forecasts”

Another winter, another season of people posting click-bait snowfall “forecasts” on Facebook. I use the term forecast extremely loosely, as its usually little more than a JPEG of the output of one run of one computer model.

I saw a post this morning (I suspect the same one Ed Wilson was referring to during the news) suggesting the possibility of something like 40″ of snow across the area next week. There are multiple things wrong with this.

First, simply from a timing perspective, it’s a week away so a whole lot of variables will change. Sure we could get snow, it could also end up in Canada or bring rain/thunderstorms to the Gulf Coast, if it makes it here at all. Anything is possible at this point. The GFS has popped up systems like this, although not to this extreme, in the 7-14 day range multiple times since before Thanksgiving if I’m not mistaken, but we have yet for any of them to materialize.

Second, receiving 40″ of snow is highly unlikely in any event as that is more snow than Des Moines has seen in a  month, let alone one day. The record for snowiest month stands at 37.0″ and dates back to January 1886. That’s 130 years. The record for a single day is 19.8″ which has stood since January 1942.

Moral of the story (TL;DR): Don’t believe snowfall forecasts more than a couple days out from the event. Anything beyond that is throwing darts at a map.

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