What if all this December rain fell as snow instead?

Depending on how you look at it, southeastern Wisconsin has either gotten very lucky or incredibly ripped off when it comes to snow in December this year.

Thanks to warm Lake Michigan air and variable low tracks, we've missed out on some big snow potential that instead has fallen as rain. 

It begs the question just how much could we have gotten if all the precipitation fell as rain? It's not an easy answer. Normally this question gets an eye roll in the meteorological community because the warmer air is, the more moisture it can hold and vice versa. And as you get colder, from a physics perspective, the air quite literally gets dryer.

But this is a unique situation; in most of our snow/rain events, the radar was a total mess. Multiple precipitation types were present nearly constantly such as in the image below. We have been in the mid-30s just about the whole month, so it's not very far-fetched to answer how much snow would it have been if we were colder. 

Radar Thursday, Dec. 15 at 12:20 a.m.

To forecast and calculate snow totals, one of the most important variables is the snow-to-rain ratio that's used in the model data – meaning how many inches of snow does it take to equal one inch of water once it all melts. It can vary greatly with temperature and elevation. The fluffier the snow, the less dense the accumulation is and generally contains less water. Snows very close to freezing or above are generally very wet and dense. 

If we convert the 2.15 inches of precipitation for December over to snow into three different ratios, there's quite the variation. If we had a 16:1 snow-to-rain ratio as they see in the Rocky Mountains, we would have gotten over 30 inches of snow this month! It still wouldn't be the snowiest month on record (December 2000 we had 49.5 inches) but it would have been well above our average of 10.4 inches for the month of December.

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But since Milwaukee isn't in the Rocky Mountains, a more accurate generalization would be a 10:1. This would be 21.5 inches of snowfall which, for a two-week period, would be impressive nonetheless. Just for fun, if we had no rain but a wet 7:1 ratio snow like what occurs in the Pacific Northwest, then it would be still well over a foot. 

What if the 2.15 inches of precipitation we've gotten this month all fell as snow?

Sadly none of this occurred, and it mostly came as rain. Still some much-needed moisture for the soil but not much wintry fun for the kiddos. Sometimes a meteorologist can only dream.