Blizzard fueled by ‘exact recipe’

Eastern Iowa just happened to have all the ingredients on hand for the season's biggest snowstorm.

“We had the exact recipe for a blizzard,” said Andy Ervin, meteorologist at the National Weather Service's Quad Cities Weather Forecast Office in Davenport. “A very cold air mass just to the northwest, but also including the Cedar Rapids area, and very warm, moist air over the Mississippi valley, the upper Tennessee valley.”

The cold air “had access to quite a bit of moisture,” and the transition between the two air masses meant “we had some exceptionally strong winds,” Ervin said.

The systems' convergence put Cedar Rapids near the western edge of the heaviest snowfall, with 10.7 inches recorded at The Eastern Iowa Airport, 15 inches at Anamosa, and 17.5 inches at Lowden.

With the precipitation moving east, “the big story over the next 24 hours as folks dig out is going to be some brutally cold weather,” Ervin said. Windchills of -20 to -30 are likely.

“Any folks who have car trouble and got in the ditch, it's not going to be a good situation,” Ervin said.

About that digging out: It's a light, fluffy snow, shovelers' impression notwithstanding.

“It was actually a dry snow, but as it fell it instantly drifted, and as it drifts it breaks up the the snowflakes into little tiny pieces,” making for dense, heavy drifts, Ervin said. “It's not a wet snow, it's a very compact dry snow.”

A modest warmup will follow today's frigid blast, but the snow that fell since Tuesday afternoon won't be melting soon.

“This will probably be the coldest weather we see in the next four or five days, tonight,” said Ervin. “We see nothing else like this coming on the heels of it, but nothing warm enough to melt off our snow. We're going to keep it for awhile.”