12/22/07 FCST:IA/IL/MO/IN/WI/MN

[Joel Wright]

Wow, this is amazing. Temp has dropped from 29 to 24 in the last half hour or so. Visibility is down to I'd say maybe 300 yards, and the snow has accumulated at least an inch in the last half hour. Still no thunder and lightning here yet, but I'm hoping to see some here shortly.

Less than 100 miles to my east in Dekalb it's a balmy 48° with a screaming southeast wind, and a line of low-topped thunderstorms heading north right at them associated with the rapidly deepening surface cyclone! AMAZING!

 

[Joel Wright]

57mph wind gust just reported from the Clinton IA location at 1:15am. Now pushing 2" here. All of that has fallen in less than an hour...

 

[Joel Wright]

Nearing 3" now. That is what has fallen in the last 70 minutes. Heaviest bands are beginning to shift north now, so heavy snow about to abruptly shut down. Never saw any lightning or heard thunder. A bit disappointed in that, but DAMN, that was impressive guys.

NIU/Dekalb about to see their temps drop a good 20 degrees over the next hour or so as the surface low passes right over them in the next 15 minutes...

 

[Derek Weston]

Here in lovely Cedar Rapids Iowa we have experienced near 8 inches or so of new snowfall.

I believe around 8 or 9 CST we experienced thunder and about a half dozen strikes of lightning in near white-out conditions.

A fun evening.

 

[Andrew Pritchard]

Temp has dropped from the mid 50's to 33F here in the last hour.

A good amount of wind damage reports coming in from the line of cells that passed through. Reports of telephone and power poles snapped, shingles taken off, and one barn in the middle of a road scattered across eastern Illinois.

 

[Jim Zandonai]

Here in RFD we had some Moderate rainshowers last evening..and mild 46 degrees before the cold front moved by and the temps dropped like rock.. We got some snow about 1 inch maybe to re-cover the ground.
This A.M winds gusted to 44mph. Looks like EC IA and Quad Cites had more excitement then here and where the warmer air was in SE IL..
An impressive Storm system indeed.

 

[Mike Peregrine]

St. Joseph got sucker punched again with this one ... 8-10" up there with heavy drifting. One of the two large pile-ups happened on I-29 in St. Joe yesterday with around 30-40 vehicles involved. The heaviest bands set up to the west and north of KC, and if you were in that zone, you're snowed in today. Kansas City keeps getting off the hook -

Edit: Story from St. Joseph Newspress
Preliminary Accumulation Map

 

[Nate Gillson]

Man, what a storm! I got like a foot of snow last night. I saw 3 flashes of lightning and heard thunder. The heaviest snow fell from 10:40 PM saturday night to 1:50 AM sunday morning. The wind was also wicked. I'm snowed in big time!

 

[Danny Neal]

70+ mph knocked the power to my whole neighborhood from severe "thunderstorms" at around 2 AM. The powerpole 15 feet in back of my house blew and broke off....LOL a ton of expletives later I finally bailed and went to my grandmas house.....no telling when power will be restored....the automated response from COM ED says 1-4 days lol.....there goes X-mas at my house!

 

[afischer]

The heaviest bands set up to the west and north of KC, and if you were in that zone, you're snowed in today. Kansas City keeps getting off the hook -

Yeah, about 2.5" at my house. The dry slot was just a little too strong/progressive, and the deformation snow band weakened rapidly by the time it pivoted fully into Clay/Jackson counties as things rapidly refocused up into eastern Iowa and Wisconsin. Friday's GFS runs actually did quite well with this system, though underestimating the heavy/convective snows from ICT to STJ.

 

[Joel Wright]

I see an 88mph wind gust was reported in Chicago. http://www.weather.gov/view/prodsByState.php?state=IL&prodtype=public

Simply an amazing, yet very fast moving little storm.

 

[Mike Pohlen]

I picked up about 2" here. MSP Int'l closed for about 45 minutes today due to the inclement weather, and about 60 flights were canceled. Minneapolis has declared a snow emergency with all of the blowing snow, and I have about a two foot drift up against my garage with absolutely none on my driveway. Makes for easy shoveling.

 

[Darrin Rasberry]

Superfail for Ames on this one.

We were forecast for tons of snow last weekend. We got a trace of dry snow.

We've been covered in snow since the beginning of December, and haven't had an above-freezing day since the day before this monster stunk up the Midwest. Of course, the day before it was around 42, generously melting all the soft snow into sludge, and when the storm passed, it gave us a miss, putting us into freezing and thus making all the snow-sludge into a huge, encompassing block of ice, not to mention all the black ice all over the roads from the melt drainage the day before. Then came the light dust-dry snow that covered the black ice and blew around in huge, powdery gales my friend said were sometimes called "ghosts" or "wisps." To this Texas boy it looked like a friggin' crack factory exploded.

We've since had another melt and another freeze, but this morning saw a gracious layer of snow added, making things *somewhat* less slippery, especially the walk to the billbox (i.e. mailbox to most other humans).