Day 1 School Closing Outlook
Valid: Thursday, January 09, 2025
Issued: Wednesday, January 08, 2025 7:31 PM
Summary:
Ongoing lake-effect snow has produced fairly widespread snow accumulations of around 1-3 inches along the lakeshore with some isolated pockets of accumulations over 4 inches. Snow is expected to taper off into the morning hours on Thursday and school closures are not expected though an area with potential for isolated delayed starts or buses running on paved roads only is possible from about Muskegon to South Haven.
Discussion:
As aforementioned, ongoing lake effect snowfall has produced areas of accumulating snow, slick, snow-covered roadways, and reduced visibility along the lakeshore today. This made for a slow-going evening commute. Normally, it is our goal to have these predictions out by 4:00 PM each day. However, given the expectation that we had, which is indeed now coming to fruition, for snow to begin to wind down and become more localized we opted to wait for later model guidance and surface observations to make a final assessment.
Initially, our map prediction this evening included a small area of <15% closure probabilities (level 1/6), however, based on the latest roadway conditions and radar imagery we have opted to remove the chances for schools to be closed on Thursday morning. In fact, we do not anticipate any measurable impacts to the Thursday morning commute at this stage as snow has really started to taper off and roadway conditions are generally pretty fair along the US-31 corridor. However, in order to err on the side of caution we have introduced a small corridor of a >10% chance for delays from about Benton Harbor to Kalamazoo to Muskegon where the latest computer weather model guidance and the latest surface observations from radar and webcam images from MDOT's MiDrive site suggests that some travel impacts may still be ongoing here this evening and which may persist into the morning hours Thursday. To reiterate, while the chances for schools to have delayed starts or to run their buses on paved roads only is not zero, we do believe that it is only slightly over that 10% threshold at best.
Comments