Blowing & Drifting

Forecast: Significant blowing and drifting, with the possibility of heavy accumulation in rural areas.

Think Snow

Now that it's June, we can reasonably assume we won't get any snow. (60 years ago, living through a giant late-May storm, we might have been overconfident.) As such, NOAA has released snowfall maps, like this one for Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

UP snow 2006-07

Just to do the math for you, 288 inches is 24 feet. Of snow. Much of that massive total came in one "snow event" in March, summarized on this map. Hancock, my hometown, is just north of the red-purple stripe running northeast up the Keweenaw Peninsula - right about where it says that 42 inches of snow fell in six days, and just north of a spot that received more than 60 inches! Five feet of snow in five days. As they say up there, "Holy wah."

This is where I think global warming is going to lead. Not just to higher average temperatures in every season, but toward more unpredictable weather: huge late-season snowfalls, unexpectedly early tornadoes, stronger and later hurricanes, and so forth. If we get a few May snowstorms here in the low-snow belt, I won't complain.