The upfront caveat for today's featured plot is that verifying Blizzard Warnings with automated weather stations is difficult. The difficulties include stations that may struggle at observing low horizontal visibility and/or have urban sheltering from blowing snow. The criterion for Blizzard Warnings also requires at least three consecutive hours with winds of at least 35 MPH and visibility values at or below a quarter mile. The Blizzard Warning for Iowa has thankfully expired this morning, so the featured chart presents a look at five selected Iowa airport weather stations along with Buffalo, NY for a wild comparison. The dashed red line show the wind requirement and dashed blue line shows the visibility requirement. Areas shaded in gray are instantly meeting both those requirements and areas shaded in blue have meet the three hour requirement. The time duration of each plot matches the duration of the Blizzard Warning for that location, except Buffalo, which is still ongoing at the time of this feature posting. For Iowa, the situation Friday afternoon was clearly the worst for the event. The visibility requirement was more difficult to meet for this event vs the wind speed. Again, caveats here as blowing snow was much more significant in rural areas. And wow, what an ongoing event for Buffalo, which is experiencing an epic Lake Effect Blizzard.

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Tags:   blizzard