A couple of snow storms in the past week shows the difficulty of predicting late winter storms.
A winter storm warning was issued last Wednesday for heavy snow across much of southeast South Dakota into Nebraska and Iowa. Some areas only got two to three inches, while others got up to seventeen inches.
Then Saturday, a system dropped up to nine inches of snow where about an inch had been predicted.
Phil Schumacher at the National Weather Service office in Sioux Falls says a degree or two either way makes a big difference…

Schumacher says it can be difficult to place the rain – snow line in any given storm….

Schumacher says they try to blend a number of computer models along with incoming data for their forecasts….

Schumacher says while they get a lot of information from surface observations, they are still short of information in the lower atmosphere.