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| Surface weather map valid midnight Sunday night shows system bringing widespread snow across southern MB |
A potent storm system is forecast to develop over the central US plains later this weekend, and is expected to bring widespread snow to southern MB Sunday night into Tuesday. After a quiet winter that has seen very little snowfall (the lowest Dec-Feb snowfall in at least 30 years in Winnipeg), this upcoming storm system has the potential to produce the most significant snowfall of the season for much of southern MB, including Winnipeg. There's still a lot of uncertainty with how this storm will track and develop, but at this point, it's looking like a widespread snowfall of 15-30 cm is possible for many areas by Tuesday.
Preceding this main storm will be an initial system on Saturday that will bring a band of snow which will push across southern MB and settle into the Interlake region. This initial impulse may bring a couple cm of slushy snow to southern MB, but it shouldn't have much impact with temperatures around the melting point. Some rain may even mix in Saturday afternoon.
Things will start to get interesting by Sunday afternoon as the main storm system starts intensifying as it moves out of Colorado. This storm will track into Minnesota by Sunday night spreading a widespread area of snow across southern MB. The snow may be wet and slushy at first with temperatures hovering around the freezing mark Sunday through Sunday night. Snow could be heavy at times Sunday night into Monday as the storm system slowly pushes across Minnesota, with gusty northeast winds as well. This will make for treacherous driving conditions across southern MB Monday. Snowfall will linger into Tuesday before the system gradually winds down. As noted, snowfall amounts are still tough to predict this far out based on uncertainty in storm track and temperature profile, but in general, it looks like most of southern MB could be looking at 15-30 cm between Saturday and Tuesday night. The highest amounts would likely be over the western Red River valley with some upslope enhancement along the Pembina escarpment, but many areas have the potential to see significant snowfall with embedded bands of heavier snow. Stay tuned as more information becomes available on this developing storm system.
