WGEM Report of the Blizzard of 2011

I copied this from the WGEM website for Elizabeth, so she can remember her first blizzard. We had about 20 inches of snow. School was called off for 4 days. This happened during "Catholic Schools Week" so it was disappointing that we missed out on those activies. However...it was fun to be snowed in with the people I love :-)

A historic winter storm produced crippling winter weather including heavy snow and blizzard conditions over a large area from the southern Plains through the middle and upper Mississippi Valley into the Great Lakes on February 1-2, 2011. Thundersnow was commonly observed during the storm from Oklahoma into Illinois. The intense snowfall and blizzard conditions completely overwhelmed the infrastructure across portions of the nation’s midsection, leading to airport closures and hundreds of cancelled air flights, as well as the closure of portions of Interstate 70 across Missouri and Interstate 44 across southwest Missouri.

Across central and eastern Missouri and west-central and southwest Illinois, the storm actually came in two waves. The first wave came on Monday January 31st as several periods of sleet and freezing rain, occasionally accompanied by thunder, impacted the portions of the region. The precipitation tapered to freezing drizzle on Monday evening, as the second crippling portion of the storm began to evolve across the southern Plains. The second wave of the storm unleashed its fury on Tuesday and Tuesday night.

A wintry mix of snow and sleet spread into central Missouri near daybreak Tuesday February 1st, and the wintry precipitation quickly overspread the area during the morning. This winter storm produced quite a range of hazardous winter weather conditions across the area serviced by the National Weather Service Office in St. Louis. Heavy snow fell across central and northeast Missouri into west-central Illinois with rates at times exceeding 2 inches per hour. These high snowfall rates combined with strong northwest winds gusting from 35-50 mph produced blizzard conditions with near zero visibility at times in white-outs and snow drifts of 3 to 5 feet deep. The University of Missouri in Columbia cancelled classes for 2 days due to the storm and its aftermath. Total snowfall accumulations along the corridor through Columbia and Jefferson City through Hannibal and Quincy ranged from 14-22 inches. A number of cooperative weather observations sites reported all-time record 2 day snowfall amounts.