Severe Weather in the Plains

July 19, 2011

Introducing...

We at USA Weather are proud to announce that we will be implementing a very simple, yet effective, system that will forecast very general long range snow amounts, among other things.  It is called the SnoScale.  So how does this work exactly?  Well, some of you may be familiar of the fact that when meteorologists discover a possible snowstorm, they won't know the exact amounts, but rather have an estimate about how strong it might be.  While this won't fix that problem, it will help to give the reader a general idea of how strong the system will be in their location.  So say we have an Alberta Clipper moving down from Canada about a week out, we would detect that and give it a rating, like this example:
Sno1 would be lighter snow, but things would start to become problematic if you lived in Sno2.  In general, the SnoScale will work best between 3-7 days out.  Ok, Sno1 means generally light to moderate snow amounts, Sno2 is starting to get on the heavy side with amounts, and Sno3 is very heavy amounts of snow/any blizzard.  On rare occasions, and I mean rare, like probably only once or maybe twice a season, I may issue a Sno4, or extreme/historic.  But for this to happen, you'd not only need extreme amounts of snow, but I'd need to have incredible confidence in what was going to happen.  Well I hope that this was simple to understand, and hopefully not a downer on everybody's summer by having  you think about snow.  On the other hand, it's scorching out for some of this, so this may be "a cool thought on a hot day."  Stay tuned!

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