More Snow Today

Still talking about the snowfall for today. Snowing in Sioux Falls as I write this. Still looking at relatively light amounts of snow with this system as it's going to be a pretty quick hitter. Generally 1-3" across the Southeastern zones of the viewing area; mainly East and South of Sioux Falls. This map shows it the best with the area in yellow being about 3 inches, and it just barely skips through Northwest Iowa. To get a bit technical for a moment, this is not what you would refer to as a "normal" storm system. Typically you have some surface features; a low pressure, and warm and cold fronts stretching out from it. Well, this storm is a little different because it has none of those components. Its more along the lines of what you would call and upper level disturbance with a VERY broad area of low pressure. Well, I mention this because when you have a system of this nature, they don't have the normal and more obvious boundaries that trigger storms, or in this case snow. We have to dig a little deeper. So, this picture below is something that's a little more complex then what we typically show but this storm gave me the perfect opportunity to show you this map.

This is what we call an Isentropic Analysis map. This shows us areas in the atmosphere with basic uplift and descent; basically, it gives us an overview of what the atmosphere is doing. Simply put, when you see the wind barbs crossing over the red lines then you have some sort of forcing, either lifting or descending. So, when your barbs are moving air toward the smaller numbers, then you have uplift. I circled the area over South Dakota and Nebraska as an example. When the wind barbs are moving air toward the larger numbers, then you have decent. I circled the area over Utah as an example. Remember that the red lines and wind barbs do not have to be perpendicular to each other, they just have to cross at some angle. The larger the angle they cross however, the stronger the forcing.
Hopefully you understood at least one part of my explanation so you can take a little piece of weather knowledge with you. If you have any questions, please feel free to comment and I can go into more depth at a later date. But regardless of that, I hope you enjoy the snow because I will!

~KDLT Meteorologist Cody Matz