Accumulating snow possible in the metro a couple weeks earlier than normal
MINNEAPOLIS (KMSP) - Well we haven’t made it to Halloween yet, but we are already talking about snow. While a few flakes of snow in the month of October happen almost every year, getting accumulating snow is a bit more unusual. Getting more than an inch of snow is actually quite rare.
Many of us may remember the Halloween Blizzard back in 1991, or at least know of it, the overall stats for the Twin Cities will show you just how historic that blizzard really was. It is NOT common to get 8 inches of snow in October and 30 inches of snow in one storm. To this day, that is still the October and November snowfall records and was one of the snowiest seasons in history. But that just goes to show how tough snowfall forecasting can be, because one major storm can send seasonal snow totals to near record levels.
But this time we aren’t talking about feet of snow. In most cases, we are talking about a little slushy accumulation that may hang around for a few hours before melting just because of how warm the ground is and how warm the atmosphere remains despite the changeover to snow.
Above are a few graphics you can click through to see some of the Twin Cities snow stats. Here are a couple of fun facts:
IF the metro can somehow accumulate an inch of snow, it would be tied for the 10th earliest one-inch snowfall on record. The earliest 1-inch snowfall is all the way in September...so this isn’t exactly breaking records.
In fact, the first flakes in the Twin Cities have been seen in the first week of September, so we aren’t even close to breaking that record either. The average first 1-inch snowfall in the metro is November 18th, but we aren’t far ahead of our average first measurable snowfall, a dusting, which is November 7th.