Well we all know that the snowstorm on Friday was significant. We saw near-blizzard like conditions in Watertown throughout the day. I-29 was shut down for about 18 hours or so. Mitchell saw another dose of heavy snow. Siioux Falls didn't see too much snow, as it dodged another bullet, something the city has done all year it seems. This wasn't just a storm that will be a story to tell, but one for the record books. As late as this morning I got another notification from the National Weather Service about a record being broke. I'm going to try to sum these records up for you, so here goes...

Let's start with the records from the Sioux Falls NWS office. Sioux Falls ended up with 3.5 inches of snow. This breaks the daily record of 0.2 inches that was set in 1953. Huron set a new daily record at 9 inches! That shattered the old record of 1 inch in 1937. As I already mentioned, Mitchell got a big dose of snow. 11.2 inches to be exact. The daily record before this was 1937 with 0.5 inches.

Alright, now on to the records in the North which are counties in the NWS Aberdeen branch's area. Let's start with the record daily snowfalls. Aberdeen saw 1.4 inches of snow, which actually was a record. The old record was 0.7 inches in 1950. More impressive was the snowfall in Sisseton. They totaled 6.9 inches which broke the old record of 2.0 inches in 1937. Sisseton also saw 1.9 inches of snow on Saturday Morning, beating the old record for that day which was 1.1 inches in 1932. Watertown was without a doubt the hardest hit. 1937 did have the record at 8 inches. They beat that with a total of 19 inches. That also translated to a few other records. They had 1.12 inches of liquid precipitation (measured after the snow was melted). That broke the old liquid precipitation record of 0.94 in 1929.

To me the next two stats are the most impressive. During the 24 hour period in which the snow fell Watertown saw 19 inches of snow. That broke an all time record of 16 inches that was set on March 24, 1937. That's right, an all time record!!! Let's also consider the last 30 days in Watertown, in which they've had 32.5 inches. In a normal season (appoximatly 3 months) they see 31.3 inches. So in the last 30 days they've gotten more snow than they normally do in an entire winter. WOW.

In one of the reports an interesting stat came across. Late season snows like this arn't that uncommon. 1994 there was a late snow that dropped 10.5 inches on April 28th. Also, the latest measurable snow for a season was recorded on May 18th, 1968.

I need to thank the National Weather Service for passing all these stats along. Its simply amazing looking back on it. I was one of those systems that caught many by surprise, including me. I hope that this was the last for this year. However looking at models for the end of this week, we may night be out of the woods just yet.