Blizzard Post-Mortem: Traverse City's Snowiest Storm Ever?

An avalanche of business shutdowns, major thoroughfares like Grandview Parkway and M-72 briefly closed to traffic, four consecutive snow days for local schools, and tens of thousands of Michigan power customers without electricity. These are just a few of the impacts of this week’s epic snowstorm.

As Traverse City digs itself out from beneath towering snow drifts and gets back to business as usual, the question bears asking: How did this storm measure up to other historic local blizzards? The Ticker sat down with Mike Boguth, a meteorologist with the Gaylord National Weather Service (NWS) office, for the full post-mortem analysis.

According to Boguth, the NWS “co-op observer site” in Traverse City, which sits 4.7 miles southeast of the city, measured a grand total of 19.8 inches of snowfall. Other parts of the state got hit even harder, including the “Tip of the Mitt” region, where measurements ranged from 24-30 inches; or the Upper Peninsula, which was smothered in 2-3 feet. In Munising, Boguth says there have been reports of 52 inches of snow – potentially an all-time state record.

At least in terms of pure snowfall, all those numbers rival – or even surpass – the famed “Blizzard of 1978,” which is typically cited as the most significant winter weather event in Michigan history.

Boguth is well-versed in that storm. It hit when he was a nine-year-old growing up in the Detroit area, and set him on his career path. “I'd always been interested in the meteorology, but that was the storm that kicked it into overdrive,” he tells The Ticker.

“Ironically, those two days [January 26-27, 1978] are both missing in the NWS climate database [for Traverse City],” Boguth says of the ’78 blizzard. “Our co-op site at the time was the airport, and the snow depth went up from five inches on the morning of January 26 up to 20 inches by the 28th.”

Snowfall numbers alone don’t tell the full story of the ’78 blizzard, though. In most other ways, that storm still dwarfed this one.

“The older generation still talks about that storm, and for meteorologists in the Great Lakes, it's still the storm all others are measured against, simply because of the strength of it,” Boguth explains. “With that storm, you’re talking almost Category 3 hurricane strength. The pressure was 955 millibars when the system got to southeast Michigan, which is unheard of. I think it's the second lowest pressure ever recorded in the United States, outside of a hurricane.”

A millibar is a measure of atmospheric pressure, and according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), standard air pressure at sea level is about 1,013 millibars. A Category 5 hurricane, meanwhile, would measure less than 920 millibars.

“So, the lower the pressure, the more intense the storm,” Boguth says. “This week’s storm, on Lake Huron, got down to about 986 millibars.”

In the blizzard of 1978, the ultra-low-pressure storm system brought winds of 60-70 miles per hour, which caused intense snowdrifts – as high as 30-40 feet in parts of the state, per Boguth – that “completely paralyzed all of lower Michigan” for days on end.

“There were over 100,000 cars in Michigan that were just left on highways and area roadways, because people simply couldn't move,” Boguth says.

This week’s storm topped out at around 45-50 mph winds on the Lake Michigan coast – well below the 1978 showing.

“But that was still enough to blow some of that snow around, especially later in the event,” Boguth adds. “When the storm started on Sunday, there was a lot of sleet mixed in. Here in Gaylord, we measured over two inches of liquid, which means there was a lot of weight in that snow. But on Monday, even as the event was winding down, that’s when the snow turned more fluffy. That’s when we had reports in Grand Traverse County that they were begging people to stay off the roads, because that's when the drifting and the blowing snow really reached its peak.”

In terms of more modern corollaries to the storm, Boguth cites two examples. The first occurred between March 2-3, 2012, brought 10.68 inches of wet, heavy snowfall in Traverse City, and knocked out power for many local households. The second was last year’s late March ice storm, which missed Traverse City but caused massive destruction to the Tip of the Mitt region. Both storms, along with this one, offer a lesson Boguth says northern Michiganders should keep in mind: that March can serve up some of winter’s most vicious blows.

“It’s the time of season where the south is warming up and warm air is coming north,” Boguth says. “But at the same time, you still have an ice box going in Canada. I just saw, in Alaska, it's negative 30 degrees. So, there’s plenty of cold air up north. You start getting that battle zone [between the warm air and cold air], and you get extreme weather. That’s what happened with this event. You had that really tight temperature gradient, and then you also had a lot of moisture available, coming off the Gulf of Mexico. Put it all together, and you have a perfect storm.”

 

Pictured: Scenes from this week's blizzard, courtesy of Traverse City Firefighters, Cherryland Electric, Cherryland Humane Society, Downtown Traverse City, and TCAPS