The radar screen doesn’t lie, but I wish it did. That big swirl of blue and white over Michigan means business. And from what the National Weather Service here in Grand Rapids is saying, business is about to escalate to a fever pitch–or should I say, a blizzard pitch. We”re looking at the potential for a foot of snow and winds upwards of forty miles per hour, beginning soon and extending through tomorrow.
This is a huge winter storm system, affecting pretty much the whole Midwest. But southern Michigan, northern Indiana, and northern Ohio appear to be the epicenter. Batten down the hatches, gang. Winter is arriving with frozen claws and icy fangs.
If you”ve read my post on Supercell Deficiency Sydrome, you know how I feel about winter. I am not a fan. In fact, my enthusiasm for snow is so minute as to escape detection by the world”s most powerful microscopes. But some storm chasers dote on winter storms. For this group of lunati–er, hardy and resourceful weather lovers–a good snowfall is Utopia; a blizzard, transcendence; a whiteout, bliss.
And then there is thundersnow. Now, that is something I must admit is pretty darn cool. (The preceding pun was not intended, merely allowed.) Not cool enough that I”ll go looking for it, though, which is what separates me from the serious thundersnow aficionado. If you”re a chaser who falls into the snow-freak category, you will drive miles to experience thundersnow. Come on, now, you know it”s true! I”ve read the posts in Stormtrack. There are a lot of you out there.
I can”t arouse myself to that level of devotion; I”m perfectly content to let snow come to me, with or without thunder. It never fails to do so, in quantities I”ve always found to be more than sufficient. Still, I do love it when the occasional rumble comes rolling through the wintry gray. That doesn”t happen often here in West Michigan, but I understand the phenomenon is not all that uncommon in Ohio, where the lake effect snow bands come whipping off of Lake Erie.
As I understand it, thundersnow requires cloud tops to reach a certain height, somewhere in the order of 25,000 or 30,000 feet. At that point, they”re capable of discharging lightning, just like a regular summer thunderstorm–except, of course, for the obvious difference in precipitation type.
This opens up new possibilities for entertainment in the winter wonderland. Let”s say, for instance, that you”re out in the meadow with your significant other, building a snowman and pretending he is Parson Brown. You give him a nice, pleasant smiley face, and you plug in two lumps of charcoal for his eyes and one lump for a cute little button nose, and you wrap a scarf around his neck, and you stick a top hat on his head, and you stick an umbrella in his hand, and suddenly WHOOOOOOOM!!! the whole freaking world ignites before your eyes, and the next thing you know, you”re sitting on your butt twenty feet from where you had been, and Parson Brown has been replaced by a smoking crater surrounded by melted snow. His cute button nose falls out of the sky and beans you on the noggin. You should never have put that umbrella in his hands–it might just as well have been a lightning rod. What were you thinking! You forgot all about thundersnow, didn”t you? Let that be a lesson.
Anyway, while I”m by no means crazy about winter weather in general, I like the idea of thundersnow. It is my one ray of joy, my bluebird of happiness between now and the spring storm season. But I still say, bring on March, when the serious convective weather begins to roll in. That”s when blizzard chasers rejoin the ranks of the rest of us storm chasers who have been hunkered down for the winter. When moisture from the Gulf of Mexico starts pumping back into the Great Plains, we”ll all be out there once again in search of tornadoes. Thank heaven, sanity will return.
