Last Nights Snow Banding

 

Much of the area last night (Sunday 2/28/2021) saw an inch or less of light snowfall. However, moderate to heavy snow bands set up just to our west moving southeast along a frontal-genetic zone. Upper-level warm air advection along with positive vorticity advection fed to the mesoscale forcing mechanism for this band to develop within a portion of the atmosphere called the Dendritic Growth Zone or DGZ. The DGZ or as I like to call it... the big snowflake-making zone, is a range of temperature favorable for large snowflakes to developed; roughly between -20 and -10 degrees Celsius.

The event was short-lived, only lasting about 4 hours... but it was long enough for this localized band of snow to produce 2-4 inches of fresh snow. Fargo/Moorhead was spared from the 2-3 inch zone however we did receive about an inch as the snow band moved just to our south. These snow bands can be quite tricky to forecast ahead of time and very difficult to tell exactly where they will form until they actually start to form.

 

Meteorologist,

Justin Storm