The biggest thing with a snow squall is visibility drops to almost nothing. Even from a few hundred feet up you can barely see the houses below in both videos. The most fascinating thing to me was the "wall" of snow you can see in the second video. Notice the dark contrast of the clouds against the sunlight you see at the very beginning. If you play the video in double speed you can see the wall of snow moving in. We go from a sunny March afternoon to near white-out conditions in just a matter of minutes.
Then on Thursday we had more squalls. Not nearly as bad as the two above, but I caught another interesting phenomenon on video:
In the early morning hours on Thursday we had a couple quick snow squalls that dropped a good dusting across the area. Should be a problem on the roads, right? Well once the sun came up, the roads cleared up pretty quick. Why? It was cloudy and 25°! That's because the sun angle is high enough in the sky by March that even through clouds and cold temps, the suns rays melt the road snow.
So why are snow squalls common in the later months like March and April? It's all about those transition months. We get warm surges for days (think about late February), followed by Winter's last stands as arctic fronts are still making their way across the region. We usually don't get snow from the front itself, but the backside brings those northwest winds across Ohio. Now here's where that March and April sun comes in to play. Like in the second video you see plenty of sun as the squall approaches. The sun heats the surface just enough to bring lift, almost like a small scale summer storm, and allows these squalls to build quickly. Boom, we have a mesoscale snow storm.
Don't be surprised if we see more of these before Spring takes over for good.
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