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Satellite Shows Snow Cover Rapidly Melting Away
Temperatures across NWS Wilmington's forecast area started off in the mid to upper 20s around sunrise on Thursday, January 5th, 2012. Other than some passing thin cirrus clouds and jet contrails, skies were mostly clear over the Ohio Valley and lower Great Lakes for much of the day. Thus, temperatures rose quickly by late morning and early afternoon. Snow depth at 7 AM that morning over southwestern Ohio and southeastern Indiana generally ranged from a trace to 1 inch, according to reports from CoCoRaHS and cooperative observers, as well as this map of modeled snow depth from the National Operational Hydrologic Remote Sensing Center (NOHRSC).
In the visible satellite imagery loop below (from 10:45 AM to 1:45 PM EST), one can see that this snow cover was what was left of lake effect snow bands from earlier in the week, which extended southeast of the Great Lakes, even into portions of southern Ohio. Temperature contours are overlaid on the satellite imagery. In just a matter of a few hours, the snow cover over southwest Ohio rapidly melted away as sunshine warmed temperatures into the upper 30s and 40s.
Just 24 hours later, little remained of the snow that had earlier covered portions of Ohio and surrounding states, as shown in the NOHRSC snow depth map below from 7 AM January 6th. Northern Indiana and southwestern Michigan, which a day earlier had a widespread swath of up to 5 inches of snow on the ground, now only had a few locations still reporting more than an inch of snow depth. That's what temperatures running 10 to 15 degrees above normal will do to a paltry amount of snow on the ground in early January!
Michael Kurz, Meteorologist Intern
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www.nws.noaa.gov
