That Much Snow?

So the Christmas storm has past and now we are dealing with the aftermath, SNOW! Many locations saw over 20" of the white stuff the past couple of days and luckily there is not much more forecasted for the next week. The Christmas storm sat over Iowa for over 24 hours and as it did it kept moving snow bands over our area that increased snow totals to a very impressive amount. The map below shows NWS estimates of how much snow roughly fell in a given area.

This map is also from the NWS and is a computer generated map of what snow fall depths currently look like. You can see many areas in South Dakota are over that 20 inch mark (dark blue).

Here are some of the totals seen from the storm:

• Kennebec 24"
• Marion 23.5"
• Sisseton 22.9"
• Sioux City 20.7"
• Yankton 20.5"
• Worthington 20.5"
• Mitchell 19.3"
• Sioux Falls 19"
• Huron 18.6"
• Cherokee 18.5"
• Vermillion 18.1"
• Madison 18"
• Milbank 17"
• Pierre 12"
• Mobridge 11.1"

Many locations broke Christmas records with snowfall totals. Sioux Falls, Sioux City, Yankton and some others saw more snowfall on December 25th then any other December 25th on record. Sioux Falls: this was the 4th largest snow event in the history of record keeping, we were only two inches away from the 2nd spot on the list that occurred back in 1909. The largest ever was 32.2" back in 1962.

~KDLT Meteorologist Dan Bronis