SHEBOYGAN COUNTY, WI (WHBL) - The first winter storm of the season has brought a mess to Sheboygan County with snow, sleet, and high winds. Snow began to fall around noon Monday, and conditions continued to get worse through the evening and overnight hours.
One part of the storm that did not go as forecast hours before was how much snow would fall in Sheboygan County. By Monday morning, the forecast was to have two to five inches fall across the area with a possibility of sleet and freezing rain.
Forecaster J.J. Wood with the National Weather Service office in Sullivan says that changed due to the actual track the storm took. "The low pressure system ending up going right across northeast Illinois, right across the Chicago area as it moved northeast. That kept us a little bit more on the cooler side, so we ended up having quite a bit more snow and sleet than we were initially forecasting and a little less freezing rain that we had forecast. When low pressure centers move further to the south of the area than we expect we tend to get more snow and perhaps some sleet with those types of systems when they move that far south.”
Wood admits that this was a difficult storm to forecast as it approached Wisconsin. “There were a lot of different precipitation types with this system, and there’s a lot of moisture to work with. To be honest it was a little bit difficult to predict exactly where and when these different precipitation types would fall, so it was a difficult forecast for us.”
One part of the storm that did happen were high winds, gusting at times around 50 miles per hour, creating near blizzard and white out conditions, along with blowing and drifting.
The National Weather Services said Tuesday that snowfall totals in Sheboygan County ranged from eight to 12 inches. These included 11-inches in Plymouth, 10.5-inches in Random Lake and south of Cleveland, ten inches around Cedar Grove, and around nine inches in Sheboygan. Other reports from overnight included around a foot in the Manitowoc area, around ten inches in the Fond du Lac area, and around eight inches in the Milwaukee area.