Snow Cover...The key player

Warm temperatures are going to be the name of the game over the next couple of days as a ridge of high pressure will be keeping the cold air at bay. But the hard part for any meteorologist is just how warm with things become. Well, this becomes increasingly complicated when you have a significant amount of snow on the ground. Why? Well as you all are very much aware of, snow is white. Because its white, it has a high albedo. A high albedo means that an object is a really good reflector of the suns rays and anything with a low albedo is a good absorber of the suns rays. Because snow has an extremely high albedo, it reflects the suns rays back into the atmosphere and that keeps the temperatures for warming up. So, snow cover becomes very important to a forecaster in the winter months because typically the more snow that's on the ground, the cooler that area will be. Here is a current snow cover map of South Dakota. You can see that many areas across the East continue to have 4+ inches of snow on the ground. Well, that really helps keep those areas cooler. But the places that have little or no snow cover can expect to see temperatures anywhere from 10-25 degrees warmer then areas with a lot of snow. So depending on where you live in South Dakota, today may still feel like winter or it may feel more like spring.

~KDLT Meteorologist Cody Matz