I guess I should know better than to discount chances of precipitation. The storm system that looked to hit mostly the Dakotas this week will be close enough to provide rain for us, too, between Monday evening and Wednesday. Due to the very slow upper winds in the northern U.S. (a pretty typical El Nino pattern), the system will be moving slowly and will hang around for a while. The combination of warm temperatures (reaching near 50 during the day, probably not dropping below freezing at night) and rain will melt a majority of our snow this week.
The graph above shows that, on average, since 1980, snow during El Nino winters melts about two weeks early, and this year looks to be no exception-- it should follow the red line in the graph pretty closely. Considering that we've had a relatively strong El Nino, our snow depth and temperature have been really good this season. The average would be 10 inches, but we've had about 14 inches on the ground during a good part of the winter, and much of the rest of the state, particularly the North Shore highlands, and southern and western Minnesota, have had even more. I've recorded 28.2 inches snow this season, which is well below average, but the water content of the snow was relatively high, so in terms of frozen water equivalent on the ground, this winter is not far from average. That, and the absence of any major mid-winter thaws made this winter feel pretty much like an average one for this area. Our average winter temperature (Dec-Jan-Feb) was 12.2 degrees F, which is only slightly above average and a couple degrees below the expected value for an El Nino winter.
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