What’s to blame for the lack of snow around Columbus?
Another winter storm is brewing on the West Coast and is expected to travel through Ohio on Sunday. But the threat of snow, at least for central Ohio, is no guarantee.
That’s because the middle section of the Ohio River Valley – loosely defined as Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky and parts of Pennsylvania and West Virginia – is in the midst of a snowfall “donut hole,” according to the National Weather Service.
A snowfall donut hole is exactly what it sounds like: an area that hasn’t received all that snow, compared to its neighbors.
“Some locations, they might get four, six or eight inches of snow from one storm but then they don’t get much else. If you happen to miss out on that, well, you end up in kind of what we call a snow donut hole, for lack of a better term,” explained Kristen Cassady, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Wilmington.
Come Sunday, snowfall does seem likely in the southern and eastern parts of Ohio, but the National Weather Service doesn’t have a firm grasp on how much that could be.
As of Friday morning, central Ohio had a 30% chance of snowfall on Sunday, with less than half an inch possible. There’s a 50% chance of snowfall overnight Sunday, with one to two inches possible.
To drive home the National Weather
Service’s point about a snowfall donut hole, consider this: Dayton International Airport has received only 0.9 inches of snow this season, the fourthlowest year-to-date total going back almost 140 years.
John Glenn Columbus International Airport has measured just 1.4 inches, most of it coming from last week’s storm.
“That’s very low. That’s very unusual to have that little (amount of) snow,” Cassady said. “But it’s not unusual for a La Niña pattern, which we’ve had this winter.”
During a La Niña year, winter temperatures are warmer than normal in the South and cooler than normal in the North. Snow is rare, but one or two storm systems sometimes deviate from their route, Cassady said.
“What we saw last week is that we had a storm track that went south of us so parts of Kentucky and Tennessee got the accumulating snow, and that kind of left us in a little bit of a donut hole,” she added.
“We may see something similar Sunday going into Sunday night depending on the exact track of this system.”
The storm system in question came ashore in Washington state Thursday morning and is projected to travel southeast to Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama before turning back north, Cassady said.
“What we’re trying to focus in on is how quickly that turn north occurs,” she said. “Does it occur west of the Appalachian Mountains, more along the spine of the Appalachians, or more along the East Coast. That’s where the uncertainty lies at this point.”
mtrombly@dispatch.com