Michigan has two snowy periods coming at us from this afternoon through Sunday morning. The two storm systems will each have their own personality and bring accumulating snow to different parts of Lower Michigan.
The first snow-maker is an Alberta Clipper storm system. An Alberta Clipper is a storm center that moves southeast out of Alberta, Canada. The storm center will not track south of Michigan, but rather across the Upper Peninsula. If the storm center tracked south, we would all be in a solid, wind-driven snow. In the case of today’s storm track to the north, most of Lower Michigan gets spurts of snow showers late this afternoon and evening. There is one exception: a large area of western Lower Michigan from near Traverse City southward to around Grand Rapids will get into a fairly robust burst of snow this evening. The forecast image below shows how much snow all of us can expect late today.
So the Alberta Clipper puts ample snow on part of western Lower Michigan while the rest of us get an inch or two of snow this evening.
The next snow-maker acts differently and puts a swath of snow down in a different location: across southern and central Lower Michigan.
Here’s the radar forecast showing the storm system coming out of Iowa and tracking through the Great Lakes. Remember, the solid swath of snow with a storm is almost always located just north of the low pressure center’s track. This is what puts the southern half of Lower Michigan in solid snow Saturday afternoon, Saturday night and very early Sunday.
This snowfall accumulation animation below gives you a great feel for the Alberta Clipper patch of snow over western Lower and the large swath of snow with Saturday night’s Iowa storm.
Usually these “Iowa storms” lay down a stripe of 3 to 6 inches of snow. That’s what I’d expect we wake up to Sunday morning. The question is, will it be a stripe across central Lower or southern Lower? Here’s a comparison of the two models I use for this storm. The first is the NAM. It’s a great model when the snow period is ending before 36 hours from now. So it’s forecasting snow a little out of its best timeframe. It could be off a touch in location of the axis of heaviest snow. The NAM has the 3 to 6 inch swath from Grand Rapids to Saginaw/Bay City and northward for about 50 miles.
The European Model is usually more accurate on placement at this timeframe. Its 3 to 6 inch swath is shifted south about two counties. It gets the 3 to 6 inch snow into Oakland County and Lansing.
In both scenarios the I-94 corridor would be south of the 3 to 6 inch snow. Detroit, Ann Arbor, Jackson and Kalamazoo are probably looking at 2 to 3 inches of snow Saturday night. As you go even farther south from I-94, there could even be occasional rain mixed in near the southern border.
Watch for updates on MLive.com and expect a winter weather advisory to be issued for some part of southern Lower Michigan for Saturday night.
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