TRAVERSE CITY — After a lake-effect snowstorm dumped nearly a foot on parts of the northwest Lower Peninsula, the coming weekend could be mild.
The National Weather Service predicts highs in the mid-50s and cloudy for the first half of Saturday, with a chance of rain later and overnight. Rain could stick around through Monday as temperatures glide back down to the mid-40s.
Eleanor Delizio, a meteorologist for NWS in Gaylord, said the system that dropped as much as 10.8 inches of snow in a spot near Long Lake is moving to the east. As it lingered, there was a chance of some snow mixed with rain Tuesday night into Wednesday, but nothing like the wintry weekend that preceded it.
“We did see some bands that were pretty decent and set up more over the western part of Grand Traverse Bay and definitely along the western coast of Leelanau County as well,” she said.
That led to big disparities in snowfall totals, from 2.8 inches in Manistee — originally forecast to get much more — to 10 inches on Stony Point near Suttons Bay, Delizio said. Meanwhile, a snow band that set up over Lake Michigan off the Benzie and Manistee shoreline mostly stayed over the lake.
“We were watching it the whole weekend just trying to watch stuff and anticipate if it was going to move inland, because if it did and it sat over them, then that could’ve been some decent totals … over there,” she said.
Looking ahead from Wednesday, the season’s first big snow should be the last for the foreseeable future, Delizio agreed.
That’s thanks to a ridge in the jet stream moving in from the western U.S., Delizio said — a bend in the fast-flowing channel of wind that snakes across the northern hemisphere’s upper atmosphere. When the jet stream bends toward the north pole, it’s called a ridge.
There’s more: ahead of that ridge, air from higher in the atmosphere will fall toward the surface, Delizio said. That causes some compression, which creates heat. While that heat usually doesn’t reach the surface, staying aloft in the atmosphere’s mid and lower levels instead, it makes for drier air. That lets the sunshine through, which does warm the surface.
“Even though we might get a slight chance for something light here and there this weekend, generally things do remain a little more quiet,” she said.