First winter storm brings little moisture to the area

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Some of the first flurries of the winter season were more sound than fury, according to weather watchers.

Mike Gillispie, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said the weekend blew in a storm system all the way from Colorado to Iowa, and Kansas to North Dakota.

“It was a fairly large storm system,” he said. “Pretty much all of the Central and Northern Plains received some precipitation out of this system.”

Some, but not much.

Gillispie said the Mitchell area recorded just trace amounts of moisture, Huron five-hundredths of an inch, 11-hundredths in Chamberlain and 10-hundredths around Dimock.

“That’s about the number we’re looking at, 10th of an inch of precipitation through the lower James Valley region,” Gillispie said.

Only a narrow band of that moisture was snow, Gillispie said, who described a “narrow band” of snowfall that stretched from Letcher to Stickney and Corsica.

“Mitchell was just east of where we had a little bit of snow,” he said.

Thunderstorms actually covered a much larger area, which Gillispie said isn’t unheard of for November — but it’s not common, either.

“It’s not rare, but I wouldn’t say it happens frequently,” he said. “We did have a pretty good band of thunderstorms.”

He said the thunderstorms stretched from Chamberlain down to Winner, and to the Pickstown area. Then he said a line formed across Interstate 29 and moved east.

Gillispie said the warm air ahead of the cold front creates an “unstable” atmosphere.

“It was just really very unstable along that cold front, and that allowed the thunderstorms to develop,” he said.

Despite the storms, Gillispie said winds were not overly strong. He said area winds, though occasionally gusting as high as 60 mph, stayed in the 35 to 45 mph range.

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