February 7-13, 2001

After the very quiet week previous to this one, the Midwest was visited by a major winter storm on February 8-10. The storm arrived in two portions, with a day of heavy snow in the northern Midwest on the 8th, followed by a slow moving frontal boundary along which a low pressure center moved from the southern Plains through to the northern Great Lakes region on the 9th and 10th. The axis of the heaviest precipitation is seen clearly from the weekly precipitation totals (Figure 7), with a wide swath of greater than 1.5 inches of precipitation through Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan. The unusual nature of this amount of precipitation in February is indicated by the percentages of normal achieved (Figure 8), exceeding 700% over a wide area. Only the farthest north edge of Minnesota and southeastern Ohio and Kentucky received less than normal precipitation amounts this week. Temperatures also split along the axis of the precipitation, with the southeastern two-thirds of the region well above normal in temperature, and the northwestern one-third below normal in temperature (Figure 9).