The 4.1" snowfall logged at O'Hare made Wednesday's storm the heaviest in November here in nearly 30 years! The city hasn't had a bigger snow in November since 7.5" fell on November 26, 1975.
-- Bill Snyder, WGN-TV weather producer
WGN-TV Chief Meteorologist Tom Skilling and the WGN Weather Center staff provide daily coverage of weather in the Chicago area.
WEATHER EVENTS: November 2004 Archives
National Weather Service-Chicago snowfall analysis illustrates Lake
Michigan's impact on Wednesday's storm totals here
National Weather Service meteorologist Mark Ratzer has generated a fascinating post-storm Chicago area snowfall analysis which illustrates just how much of an effect Lake Michigan's warmth had on area snow accumulations this past Wednesday. Though evaporative cooling--a process which removes heat as precipitation falls into a dry air and initially evaporates--permitted snow to reach into the city, lakeside accumulations were far less than those to the west---in the Fox Valley, for instance.
Here is a link to the snowfall distribution map:
http://www.crh.noaa.gov/lot/science/24nov2004/snowmap.gif
Happy Thanksgiving to all! Thanks to a final burst of heavy snow over the city late Wednesday night, the final official snowfall tally at O'Hare reached 4.1". The storm was, as we explained on our Tribune weather page, a record breaker for Nov. 24 here in Chicago and had to overcome some real obstacles in doing what it did in the snowfall department--namely an extraordinarily warm lake (temps were near 50 degrees as the storm approached and Wednesday's powerful northeasterly surface winds were blowing in off that warm water).
It was the biggest single day November snowfall here in 27 years and produced a snow cover on Thanksgiving Day for only the 10th time since the snowfall records here began in 1885. My thanks, as always, to my colleagues Bill Snyder, Steve Kahn, Frank Wachowski and Richard Koeneman here at WGN for their work in their work pinning those stats down.
I want to call your attention to an excellent analysis of Wednesday's pre-Thanksgiving Day, 2004 storm put together by Bill Nelson, Mark Ratzer, Christine Krause and Al Pietrycha of the National Weather Service-Chicago. You can check it out by clicking on this link to the National Weather Service-Chicago home page:
http://www.crh.noaa.gov/lot/science/24nov2004/2004thanksgivingsnowstorm.html
We've been receiving some excellent photos of the results of Wednesday's snowstorm--the first in this area of the season--and plan to post some excellent photos shortly. Please check back with us on that...
-- Tom Skilling, WGN-TV Meteorologist
