Spring has officially arrived, and, for parts of the country, this means that the most special time of year has arrived. No, I don’t mean when the flowers bloom and the trees bud; I mean the time of the year when the largest snow storms are likely to occur.
The Rockies is the part of the country that often receives its largest snow storms in April (as well as October). The reason being that during the heart of winter, the jet stream (the fastest layer of winds) often directs storminess across the country so quickly that storms move in and out of the Rockies too quickly to produce huge snow storms (huge snow storms by Rockies’ standards).
In the spring (and again in the fall), storms often move much more slowly–sometimes remaining over the same general region for days at a time. This provides the opportunity for tremendous amounts of precipitation, and in the Rockies, the higher elevations mean that it often remains cold enough for this precipitation to fall in the form of snow.
One such storm occured in Lander, Wyoming, in late April of 1999. From April 21-24, a whopping 52.7 inches of snow fell. Happy Spring.
These tremendous late-season storms sometimes extned westward into the Sierra of California, northeastward into the northern Plains, and occuassionally occur in the mountains of upstate New York and northern New England.
–Paul Yeager
