Being in the field of meteorology, I’m always on the lookout for all kinds of weather but there are quite a few weather phenomena that I may never see in my lifetime. One being ball lightning, another being an EF-5 tornado, and most likely I’ll never see frogs falling out of the sky, all of which I’m ok with not seeing! But there is one elusive phenomenon that I’ve been looking for and kind of hoped I’d see by now in person, but to no avail.
I’m referring to the snow roller, which is something that hardly ever happens but is the darnedest thing when it does. The elements that are needed to produce one of these snow rollers are fresh snow that is of the heavy and wet variety, usually the kind of snow that falls when it’s at or near the freezing mark and a fairly windy day.
Sounds simple, right? Well, not so much. Snow rollers are basically snowballs that are naturally made. The wind picks up a small amount of snow and starts rolling a small snowball across the wet snow and it increasingly gets bigger as the wind rolls it along. They look just like someone rolled up a big snowball to make a snowman or a fort, but without the footprints!
Weather Last Week
March 3: 22/64/0.01” Rain
March 4: 19/40/0.02” Rain
March 5: 16/53/0”
March 6: 22/40/1.3” Snow
March 7: 17/34/0”
March 8: 13/48/0”
March 9: 24/65/0”
Forecast discussion for the week ahead:
We are in the middle of a taste of spring, but it’s March so things can change on a dime. A rather strong weather system is going to move across Nebraska bringing winter back for a while. We’ll be on the western side of the low pressure system, so colder air and a rain snow mix will be possible to round out the work week. We’ll try to warm back up next week!