Heavy snow … for about 3 minutes

We had two brief intense snow showers during the day today.

The first was actually an intense downpour of graupel (snow pellets), which were mostly about 1/8" (3mm) in diamter. This happened around 12:15PM and lasted maybe 3 minutes. Visibility during this event was down to about 1/4 mile.

The second was near a near white-out, with visibility almost down to 1/10 mile … I could barely see the Lincoln Tower less than two blocks away. This was regular snow, and it left perhaps as much as 0.2" of snow in 3-5 minutes.

The rest of the day had periods of light snow and/or graupel; and we almost had a break in the clouds around 1PM … but couldn't quite pull it off.

We've had more snow showers this evening, and it is now nearly 30 degrees cooler than it was 34 hours ago -- Sunday's high was 52.2 at 3:06PM, at 1:06AM (Tuesday), it is 23.2.

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awc 2010-01-26 01:18:49