Heavy snow and a severe thunder storm? How often do you see this?

[MatthewCarman]

Heavy Snow Warnings with a Severe Thunder Storm Warning in the middle of it all. How often does this happen?

 

[Brandon Sullivan]

Lots of time when I see this , it turns out the snow warnings are for higher elevations.. I saw it a few times already this year, with these strong lows, where the rain snow cutoff is sharp.

 

[Andrew Pritchard]

We did have the severe thunderstorm warnings issued on the convective snow cells, or whatever you want to call them in Illinois a few years back (2003 or 2002).

Warnings were issued for high winds with small little snowbursts.

This brought those "snow rollers" across the area which occur rarely when winds of 60 mph or so accompany the heavy wet snow. Actually looks like people rolled them in the fashion you would when making a snow man.

From ILX:

Once the initial "seed" of the roller is started, it begins to roll. It collects additional snow from the ground as it rolls along, leaving trails behind it. The appearance is similar to building snowmen, except the snowball is more log-shaped rather than spherical, and many times they are hollow. They can be as small as a golf ball, or as large as a 30 gallon drum, but typically they are about 10 to 12 inches in diameter.

 

[Doug Raflik]

From ILX:

Now that is neat.

 

[Jason Persoff]

When I lived in Boulder, Colorado back in 1992 there was a spring severe thunderstorm that actually was associated with snow downbursts, hail, and lightning. It was one of the weirdest things I've lived through. But it does happen.

Thunder snow can occur during strong convective events (you can see these during particularly systems that evolve in fall and spring) and rarely can produce "snownadoes" (though these are typically waterspouts over relatively warm bodies of water). The other stuff above, however, is pretty cool

 

[BKDPhillips]

A friend sent this to me and thought I would share the NWS link of recent shots of snowrollers, which I had not heard of before. I did a search and found you had discussed them before but thought you'd still like to see these since they are rare.

http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/otx/photo_gallery/snow_rollers.php

At least this thread answered some of my questions such as how high the wind would have to be to start one of these.

Glad spring is here though and the weather that accompanies the increasing temps.

Belinda