Up to two feet of snow has fallen in the hills of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula since Sunday, in what has become a historic May snowstorm for the area. The Weather Service office for Marquette recorded an astonishing 19.8 inches of snowfall on Monday alone.
A wintry pattern in the Northeast quadrant of the Lower 48 is primarily fueled by the massive swirling low pressure area loitering over the region. The large-scale pattern that helped it to develop has become something of a traffic jam across the Northern Hemisphere.
Configurations like that over the North American region are known as an Omega block, because it looks like the Greek letter Omega: Ω. In the simplest terms, this Omega block is made up of stormy low pressure over the Northeast, calm high pressure over the Rockies region, and another stormy low pressure near California. Nothing has been in a hurry to move as this pattern it often rather stable.In addition to big spring snowfall in some regions of the Northeast, there has also been scattered record or near-record chill with temperatures as much as 20 to 30 degrees below normal.
It’s not all cold and wintry in the Lower 48. Under the high-pressure portion of the Omega block, zones of record warmth occurred in recent days across the Pacific Northwest and into the northern Rockies. On Monday,Historic May snow in Michigan The 19.8 inches that plastered Marquette hurtled past the 14.2 inches set on May 10 in 1990 to become the largest snowfall of any May Day there. The 1990 event dropped just shy of 2 feet over two days.This one has produced at least 25.8 inches from Sunday through Tuesday morning, with a liquid equivalent of an incredible 4.16 inches. On average, 1 inch of rain equals 10 inches of snow, making this is an extraordinarily wet snow event.
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