Day 1 School Closing Outlook
Valid: Thursday, December 5, 2024
Issued: Wednesday, December 4, 2024 3:48 PM
Summary:
Widespread school closures are expected for Thursday Morning, especially across the Western half of our coverage area. A winter storm is expected to begin impacting West Michigan overnight tonight and through the day Thursday. The dynamics and fairly widespread nature of this system will allow for nearly every threat to have some bearing on snow day chances.
Discussion:
Winter Storm Warnings and Winter Weather Advisories are in effect for nearly all of our coverage area ahead of the aforementioned winter storm.
We do expect school closings to be fairly widespread across the Winter Storm Warning area due to the combination of heavy snow, blowing snow, flash freezing, strong winds, and cold temperatures. Across this area, we have probabilities of snow days as high as 90% and as high as >91% across the Northwestern portion of the Winter Storm Warning where we anticipate the timing and overall impacts of this storm system to be the most supportive of school closures.
Elsewhere across the Winter Storm Warning, the potential lack of ongoing snowfall is precluding confidence just a bit and hence, is why we have begun to slightly lower overall snow day chances the further East you go, particularly along the I-96 corridor.
All that having been said, blowing snow and strong winds are expected area-wide and we do expect that snow days will be fairly widespread because of this but we have opted to err more on the conservative side of things for this particular outlook just due to the nature and orientation of the snow bands and the somewhat poor timing of said snow bands and the brief lull that will likely occur at around 5:00 AM tomorrow morning, just as snow day decisions are being made.
Some areas may also see a flash freeze event occur and those areas will be especially susceptible to snow days. We would also be remiss that unless you are along the US-127 corridor, that conditions will not really improve much through the day on Thursday, and may even worsen. So school administrators may be taking those concerns into consideration as well.
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