Our Forecast Vs. What Actually Fell

Jonah Drake (Owner & Co-Founder)
6 days ago
2 min read

Our forecast Vs. what actually fell:

Transparency and accuracy is super important folks and that's what we always strive for here at West Michigan Weather!

We feel it's important to share how our forecasts perform with all of you, especially in the aftermath of storms like this one when we had a lot of questions about why our forecast looked the way it did.

So with that in mind, we hope that this post helps shed some light on those questions and provides some answers and reassures you all that you can be confident in our forecasts!

In the graphic below the image in the light blue box on the left shows what our final forecast was issued right as the snow began to fall across West Michigan yesterday morning. The blue box on the right shows the final snow accumulation results from this storm courtesy of our friends at NWS Grand Rapids.

Our forecast featured a narrow 5-8 inch zone from Hart to Big Rapids to Mount Pleasant and points north and continued from Mount Pleasant, along the US-127 corridor, to St. Johns, Lansing, and Jackson and points east. For the most part, this forecast zone did well, with only slightly amounts lower than forecast in localized areas within this region. Most notably in and around the Ludington area where totals struggled to reach 4-5 inches.

Areas to the southwest of the aforementioned zone, including Muskegon, Newaygo, Grand Rapids, Ionia, Charlotte, and Coldwater, were within our zone that featured a forecast for 7-10 inches, with some locally higher amounts possible. This zone verified incredibly well with near 100% accuracy and totals across this area ranging from 7-9 inches with localized totals over 9 inches in parts of Newaygo, Kent, and Muskegon Counties.

Our final zone in far Southwest Michigan including Holland, Allegan, South Haven, and Three Rivers also verified incredibly well with widespread totals over 8 inches and a few reports of a whopping foot of snow in 12 hours - that's an average of 1 inch/hour snowfall rates for a consistent 12 hours!