With the entire state under a blizzard warning during portions of Saturday and Sunday, one may wonder if the entire state experienced blizzard conditions. The term blizzard is typically applied to a period of at least three hours where visibilities are less than 1/4 mile due to snow or blowing snow along with wind speeds at or above 35 mph. People typically do not stand outside during strong winter storms, so it is hard for them to meet the three hour requirement and only report an instantaneous blizzard. Automated weather equipment struggles at low visibilities... The featured chart shows a comparison between reported three hour visibilities and wind speeds. Both plots contain two sets of data. The 'best wind' dataset includes the variable combination when winds were the strongest. The 'best vis' contains the observations when visibilities were the lowest. The x-axis is shown in log format, so to visually see smaller values. The left hand chart uses max/min values over the three hours, while the right hand chart uses simple averages (helping out the wind criteria). Even using the more lenient method, only ~20% of the sites in Iowa hit blizzard criteria in this qualitative form. For those that were outside, they probably considered the weather blizzard like.

Update: NWS Directive has the blizzard warning criteria as "Sustained wind or frequent gusts greater than or equal to 35mph accompanied by falling and/or blowing snow, frequently reducing visibility to less than 1/4 mile for three hours or more." (but no definition of what "frequently" means)

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Tags:   winter1011   blizzard   nws