January 12-13 Summary

Boy do I like over achievers! That's what this storm system was. Looking at the setup days out, and even the day before, I just didn't see anything that would make this a high impact storm. I figured we would be on the northern fringe and we would see a dry slot midday that would minimize accumulations.

Well, I was wrong on both counts.

We woke up Saturday morning to the storm taking an unexpected jog northward. That moved us from the fringe to a strong area for accumulation. Then I thought we would see the dry slot in the afternoon, and it appeared! You'd think that northern jog would put us in a prime location for that dry slot, but it stayed south of Central Ohio. Some of Southern Ohio and the Cincinnati area got a break, but for almost the entire day we stayed in an area of light to moderate snowfall.

Here's how the snow totals played out for us here in Central Ohio:

There was a good zone of heavy snow from around Wilmington to Lancaster that was the sweet spot, just north of where the dry slot cut down on accumulation. I had called from 2-3" for most of Central Ohio, but I was off, we ended up with twice that. I measured 5.5" here in Canal Winchester.

This became a high impact event as the evening went on. Snowfall rates eventually got high enough to make it tough on ODOT to keep up with the plowing, and travel was pretty dicey by sunset. All counties were at least under a Level 1 Snow Emergency, with most counties a row further south being in Level 2.

These impacts could have been worse if it were a work week, and this snow fell over a shorter period. We had almost 24 hours of snow, but if it were in 6-12 hours, that could have brought a lot of our area to a halt.

Now we move on to our next storm that I'll start covering as the week starts. Less than a week out and it's looking like we could have a repeat storm. Almost identical to this weekend's setup. I'll keep you updated.