Hyper local snow totals, next system Tuesday night

All weather is local. Really local.

A forecast of zero to 10 inches of snow in the metro? That might bring a good laugh at your local meteorologist if she tossed that range out there. But she would have been right on the money with Sunday night's metro snowfall totals.

Is there still time to enroll in law school?

Last night's snow system produced some amazingly hyper-localized snowfall totals. Not only did the northern metro basically get skunked, there were also huge differences in snowfall just one to two miles apart.

Take a look at the totals between Bloomington at 3.5 inches and Savage at 8 inches, situated just a couple miles apart across the Minnesota River valley.

Some selected totals across the metro illustrate the impressive snowfall range.

• Forest Lake, 0.7 inch

• Roseville, 1 inch

• North St. Paul, 2.3 inches

• Plymouth, 2.8 inches

• Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, 3.6 inches

• National Weather Service office in Chanhassen, 5.4 inches

• Burnsville, 6 inches

• Prior Lake, 8.5 inches

• Lakeville, 9.8 inches

The meteorological driver for such widely varying local snowfall totals? Convective snow clusters. It sounds like a new breakfast cereal for weather geeks. But last night's system generated localized bands and cells of heavier snowfall that dumped twice as much snow in some communities, than in others just a couple of miles away.

That's typical of more convective spring-like snow systems.

Here's a wider look at metro snowfall totals. From literally nothing in the north and northeast metro, to heavy snow of 9.8 inches at Lakeville. The dumping ran southeast to Rochester and La Crosse, Wis.

For a storm with a high degree of difficulty (aren't they all this winter?) this one was reasonably well forecast. We knew the heaviest snow band would favor areas just south of the metro with a big cutoff north and that happened. The surprise was the magnitude of the heavy snow band that edged into the south metro.

Sloppy underfoot

We slog through slush today as temps rise above the thawing point. Low 40s tomorrow continue the melt until the next system arrives Tuesday night.

Tuesday night's arriving system is "temperature critical" once again. Temps hover a couple of degrees either side of freezing in the lowest mile of the atmosphere again. That means a potential mix of anything from rain, to sleet to snow.

Spring returns next week?

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts model is hinting at a return to spring and 60s again next week.

Stay tuned.