The weather outside’s been frightful.
Blizzards in Michigan remind me strongly of cheese in Wisconsin; it’s pretty much expected, isn’t it? It borders on surprising due that we’re more known for lakes than whiteouts, as both are insanely ubiquitous in our little mitten.
The night of Tuesday, February 1, Kalamazoo got one of these blizzards. And it was a real sight to see. It wowed us with thunder snow as it pounded us with snow squalls, and made Western Michigan University close its doors February 2. When all was said and done, WKZO reported a total accumulated snowfall from this blizzard of one foot, getting up to 13 inches in Portage and a resounding 14 inches in Oshtemo.
The snowstorm ended long before early forecasts indicated and locally fell short of the hype that was generated around it, but the Kalamazoo Gazette informed its readers that Wednesday’s blizzard was the largest in the city’s record since 1965. According to statistics gathered by City-Data.com, this blizzard accounted for roughly one-sixth of our average annual snowfall and the entirety of February’s average snowfall.
“The snow isn’t over,” cautioned local weather expert Ray Hackman. Another wave of snowstorms was projected to cross Michigan over the weekend, with flurries much of this week. Hackman said Wednesday that six inches over the weekend was entirely possible. At the time of this reporting, no official numbers for the weekend’s snowfall were available.
Molly Metheny, a Senior Anthropology student, was amazed by the scope and power of the storm, “I’m pretty sure it was colder here than in Alaska.” The storm was certainly massive and frigid, spanning a third of the nation and bringing snow to the Gulf of Mexico.
Student Ambassador Amberose Nolan responded by cursing the season’s “sudden, yet, inevitable betrayal.”
Students made the most of their day off in a variety of ways. Kassandra Gmitter, a Psychology student, decided to play in the snow, while Secondary Education major Christine Hamman diligently worked on a paper regardless of the weather. Heidi Schmucker, who studies Communication, devoted an entire album on Facebook to snow day misadventures.
Facebook chatter seemed to indicate that the highlight of Tuesday and Wednesday’s dusting was a rather rare event called “thunder snow,” or more technically a “thunder snowstorm”. Many people, like Political Science student Alexander Roman, had never seen the phenomenon before in their lives. Others, like Computer Science student Matthew Rodgers, didn’t believe it was possible. Evidently, thunder snow is a rare part of the “Lake Effect” that Kalamazoo residents are all-too-familiar with.
And while here at Western we were able to celebrate the snowfall with a day off and marvel at how lucky we were to witness a rare meteorological event, other parts of the country bore the brunt of a storm that we managed to just be grazed by.
Roy Orozco, Chief of Staff or Chicago’s Mayor, said during the height of the blizzard, “We are experiencing a storm of historic proportions … the likes of which we haven’t seen in decades.” To understand what he meant, it’s necessary to look at the blizzard far beyond what we saw here in Kalamazoo.
Orozco’s own city of Chicago, received 20.2 inches as reported by the Chicago Sun Times, leaving hundreds of motorists trapped on the city’s Lake Shore Drive. The Indianapolis Star warned its readers to stay inside Tuesday as communities scrambled to set up shelters across Indiana. KWQG in Davenport, Iowa, reported that snow left US-61 north of their city desolate, looking like a “movie scene of abandoned cars;” at the same time, 13 inches of snow found in Portage. According to the LA Times, buildings buckled under the weight of snow in locations like Middletown, Connecticut; Long Island, New York; and Boston, Massachusetts. The Times went on to say over 13,000 flights were cancelled and at least a dozen deaths were reported.
Derek Kevra, a meteorologist in New Orleans, wrote an article about the blizzard Tuesday afternoon anticipating that “down here, all we have to worry about is the passing of some nasty thunderstorms,” shortly before the entire Gulf Coast was covered in ice and snow, and faced a rare winter weather warning according to the Wall Street Journal, leading to car accidents doubtless as numerous as snowflakes in a region of the country unfamiliar with the white stuff.
The Environment News Service reported the storm spanned more than 20 states from New Mexico to Maine, and left airports, roads and all sorts of businesses and schools shut down, not to mention thousands of people nationwide without power. The ENS went on to say that high winds, sub-zero chills, and ice challenged the National Weather Service and local authorities’ efforts to dig the Midwest out for days after the blizzard had passed.
Kevra explained the science of the storm elegantly in his blog for WWLTV: “Picture it like this: the atmosphere is a water balloon and the moisture from the gulf is making the balloon bigger and bigger. The front is the pin that pops the balloon, thus releasing all the water,” he explained. His proverbial water balloon was huge by the time it burst, and the cold temperature made the water within fall as snow across the nation. Thunder snow, like we experienced, is an even more complex phenomenon.
Unsurprisingly, a t-shirt has been made to commemorate the blizzard. The website snowday2011.com has for sale a light-blue shirt that reads, in chilled and snowy text, “I survived Snowpocolypse 2011.”
And of course this is all part of a larger weather pattern that typically follows the El Nino that we observed last year. This Wednesday’s blizzard, and the snows to follow on the week ahead, are part of the La Nina pattern, or as Huffington Post calls it, “Snowmageddon.”
Naturally Al Gore, in an article published by Huffington Post, attributed the blizzard to climate change (“Global Warming” being something of a misnomer in this case) and equally naturally, Fox News (specifically Gene Koprowski) doesn’t believe him. No surprises there, at least.