Why Minnesota's snow total forecast for latest storm has dropped
MINNEAPOLIS — A storm system is set to arrive in Minnesota late Friday, likely bringing several inches of snow for the Twin Cities.
Earlier forecasts showed the potential for up to 9 inches of snow in parts of the state, including the metro. But the latest accumulation models have dialed totals down a bit.
The WCCO NEXT Weather Team says based on six different forecast models, the metro could see between 2-6.5 inches of accumulation by late Saturday — though a narrow band may see more.
Meteorologist Joseph Dames says it will be fluffy snow, with central Minnesota and western Wisconsin still the general area for the highest snow totals.
The National Weather Service predicts between 3-6 inches will fall in the metro, and it's issued a winter weather advisory for most of Minnesota, Wisconsin and the Dakotas from Saturday at midnight through 6 p.m. Parts of eastern Minnesota and western Wisconsin are also in an ice storm warning.
A NEXT Weather Alert has also been issued due to potential impacts on state roads.
So why the big change in snow total predictions?
Dames reminds us that weather models are always going to change as we near an event.
"The closer we are to that event, the more clear the forecast is. That means, there will be a contrast between weather data from three days ago, and even a few hours before the snow arrives," Dames said.
What's changed in the last 24 hours?
The amount of moisture has come down, meaning we won't have as much to work with to build some of the massive snow totals that were indicated in previous weather models.
And Dames says there are signs of dry air preventing some areas from seeing snow until later in the night.
What hasn't changed?
Dames say the general timing and location of the snow is still the same.
"It will happen late Friday night closer to midnight and will continue through Saturday morning," he said.
The system will exit in time for Super Bowl Sunday, but it will usher in a string of days with single-digit highs and subzero lows, likely leading to some cold weather advisories.
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WIRED
2 hours ago
- WIRED
The Viral Storm Streamers Predicting Deadly Tornadoes—Sometimes Faster Than the Government
Jun 11, 2025 7:30 AM Storm streamers are using radars and AI robots to predict extreme weather for millions of YouTube subscribers, in some cases faster than the National Weather Service, which has been gutted by DOGE. A large tornado moves down a highway in Texas. Photograph:At 10:44 pm eastern time on May 16, Ryan Hall spotted a blue square on his radar indicating debris flying into the air and realized a huge tornado was racing toward Somerset, Kentucky. 'We've been watching this storm for a while, we've been hootin' and hollerin' for a while, hopefully the message has gotten out there and we know to be in our safe spots,' Hall warned his YouTube audience in a calm voice with a Southern twang. A silver robot with blue eyes popped onto the screen to tell Hall that a viewer had commented about tiny houses near the tornado. 'Oh really?' Hall replied to his AI robot, known as Y'all Bot. The 31-year-old host of Ryan Hall, Y'all—one of YouTube's most popular weather channels with 2.8 million subscribers—went live for nearly 12 hours that day as more than 70 tornadoes swept through the central U.S., killing at least 28 people. Nineteen of the dead were in Kentucky. Hall, too, was under tornado warning as he streamed from his home in Kentucky. Sirens went off in Somerset, but the National Weather Service lagged behind in upgrading its tornado warning, Hall told viewers. He also said that recent cuts had left the NWS office in Jackson, Kentucky short staffed. 'We're about to have a large tornado go through a very populated area with much less warning than what there should be, as a result of that,' he said. It wasn't until 10:57 pm that the NWS finally upgraded its tornado warning for Somerset. Hall doesn't have a meteorology degree, but employs meteorologists like 27-year-old Andy Hill, who frequently appears on his livestream. Hill was on vacation during the deadly tornadoes, but noted that Hall had correctly read the radar. 'He was just looking at, essentially patterns and radar data, which is what I've attempted to teach him over the years,' Hill said. 'On May 16, I think Ryan definitely saved some lives.' A new generation of storm forecasters are going live on YouTube for hours during severe weather events, offering real-time updates to millions of subscribers through a network of storm chasers, and even using AI. Their devoted fans help shape the forecast by sending on-the-ground photos of these storms, for example lemon-sized hail, for the streamers to show live on their screens. As the Trump administration slashes federal weather forecasting staff and climate change supercharges storms, their reports are not only entertaining, but crucial and potentially life-saving. This form of weather content is growing rapidly, but so far there are two main YouTube weather forecasters. Hall, who employs about 40 people across his media business and non-profit, and YouTube's second biggest weather streamer, Max Velocity, are game changers who frequently warn their millions of fans about tornadoes on the ground before the NWS issues official alerts. They do this by interpreting blobs of color on the radar and hosting feeds of storm chasers going live from their vehicles. Hall's AI bot interacts with him during storms and it even has its own channel where it goes live 24/7. At the same time that storm streamers, who are funded via ads on YouTube and merch sales, are booming, the primary source they rely on is in chaos. The Trump administration and Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have gutted staff at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which includes the National Weather Service, meaning less accurate forecasts from all meteorologists. The NWS, which was already understaffed, has lost 600 employees since January; in June, the NOAA announced it would rehire 100 NWS workers. And as yet another above-normal hurricane season begins, the new generation of storm streamers is careful to avoid the subject of climate change when talking to their audiences in deep red states — to avoid alienating viewers who don't believe in it. AI Weather Bot Y'all Bot lives on a server in Hall's Weather House in Kentucky, a large home that is decked out with a studio, edit suites and tornado shelter. When Y'all Bot launched last year, its first job was to interact with Hall on the livestream, helping to fill dead air. Y'all Bot was buggy at first but learned the ropes quickly. Now, it has its own channel separate from Hall's with more than 800,000 subscribers where it goes live 365 days a year, regurgitating NWS warnings and interacting with viewers. Viewers post in the chat asking the bot to tell them the weather in their area, and it reads them the latest forecast. However, it hasn't learned how to read radar imagery yet, Hill said, and would likely never be able to do that independent of human supervision. 'It's going through all the text-based information that it has access to and relaying it in a continuous format,' Hill said. 'Humans have to sleep, we can't always be there.' 'It is 100% independent, running itself,' said Caleb Beacham, a 22-year-old storm chaser who worked for Hall before leaving in early June. 'It has learned how to forecast weather all on its own through AI and computer learning.' 'We're seeing exponential growth on that channel,' Beacham said. He's aware of the backlash to AI but said their audience loves the little bot. 'We're trying to embrace it and incorporate it into that life-saving information.' Competition Heating Up Meanwhile, 22-year-old Max Schuster, who goes by Max Velocity, live streams tornado and hurricane forecasts from his dorm room in Florida. His more than one million YouTube subscribers are familiar with his cat Cheese Curd, who often walks across his desk, seeking attention. 'I'll usually pick her up at some point during the stream, and show everybody,' he tells WIRED. His operation is bare bones compared to Hall. Behind him is a neon sign in the shape of a storm cloud with a lightning bolt. He uses one camera, five monitors, a couple lights and simple software that instantly broadcasts new NWS alerts onto his livestreams. He recently graduated with a meteorology degree and is moving out of his dorm this summer into a larger studio space. As traditional media shrinks, storm streamers are growing; Schuster recently hired his first full-time employee—Reilly Dibble, who used to work for Hall. 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Cuts across the National Weather Service are making storm streamers nervous. The NWS weather balloon launches collect valuable information on temperature, humidity, pressure and winds. 'Because there's been a lack of balloon launches, the data that's getting fed into these models just haven't been as good as they could have been,' Beacham said. Fewer planes flying into hurricanes will mean less accurate forecasts of where hurricanes will make landfall, Schuster said. Jana Houser, a storm chaser and meteorology professor at Ohio State University, says the understaffing at the National Weather Service office in Jackson, Kentucky during deadly tornadoes was 'a small glimpse of what's to come. ' 'The office did as good of a job as they could have possibly done, but they didn't have the resources that they could have possibly had in a different climate,' Houser says. 'Unless we get full staffing in, there are going to be tired forecasters. There are going to be overworked people. There are going to be missed tornadoes.' Houser said streamers like Hall are providing a public service. 'He is helping to inform the general public, which is a service, especially under the context of a poorly-funded and resource-starved National Weather Service.' But she adds that storm streamers can misread the radar and raise the alarm about a cloud formation that is not capable of producing a tornado. This is problematic if there's conflicting information between a streamer and the National Weather Service. 'It can create a sense of distrust or confusion,' she said. Hill said his team is 'immensely careful' but it's impossible to perfectly forecast tornadoes, and they do make mistakes. Calling tornadoes before the National Weather Service means they have a higher false alarm rate than the federal agency, Hill said. 'There's a lot of layers there to justify before [the NWS] sends out a warning. So their false alarm rate is going to be much lower than ours,' Hill said. Climate Change Conundrum Hurricanes are becoming more frequent as global heating cooks the planet, but you wouldn't know it by watching the storm streamers. They know the climate is changing, but many of their viewers live in red states, so they avoid the subject. President Donald Trump has consistently downplayed climate change; during the 2024 election he called it 'a big hoax.' Yale's 2024 Climate Opinion Map that measures perceptions about climate change across the U.S. found that a majority of people in hurricane-prone states like Florida, Texas and Louisiana, and states in tornado alley, believe global warming is happening. But a sizable percentage of people in those states, around 30 percent, don't believe it's caused by human activities. Schuster, whose fans are mostly based in the hurricane and tornado zones of Texas, Illinois and Florida, believes climate change is happening. 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San Francisco Chronicle
2 hours ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
This spot in California is so windy, locals call it a ‘little hurricane' zone
California is a state defined by wildly diverse topography; from the tall peaks of the Sierra Nevada, to the lush lowlands of the Central Valley and the rugged cliffs lining more than 800 miles of coastline. But when it comes to wind, the invisible force that shapes landscapes and fuels wildfires, one spot in the state consistently stands above the rest. A Chronicle analysis of three decades of wind gusts shows the state's windiest spot isn't a mountain peak, a high desert bluff, or even Point Reyes, which once reportedly logged a gust of 133 mph. It's Cape Mendocino — a remote coastal headland — which juts out into the Pacific Ocean just south of Eureka and marks the westernmost point in California. Cape Mendocino is a part of California's Lost Coast, a rugged, roadless stretch well-known by backpackers, where Highway 1 detours inland to avoid the steep terrain. Just south of Eureka, the cape is surrounded by steep cliffs, redwood groves and isolated communities like Petrolia and Shelter Cove. 'Yeah, it doesn't surprise me at all,' said Nick Pape, the fire chief in Shelter Cove, a small community tucked just southeast of the cape, of the region's windiest designation. 'We get the full brunt of the wind out here. There's no protection. It just comes screaming off the ocean and hits us head on.' A January 2023 storm stands out in Pape's memory. 'I couldn't even open the door of my duty truck, the wind was that strong,' he said. 'We had to open an emergency shelter and evacuate residents after trees came down on homes. That one (storm) came in from the south and we're totally exposed from that direction.' The Channel Islands, located off the Southern California coast, ranked at the state's second windiest area; gusts there are similarly amplified by steep coastal terrain and open ocean exposure. Further inland, exposed ridgelines near Lake Oroville, the high-country terrain of the Emigrant Wilderness and mountain passes around Kingvale and El Dorado National Forest all consistently experience intense gusts, each shaped by California's unique and varied landscape. The cape's fierce winds are driven by two seasonal patterns. The strongest and most persistent gusts occur in spring and summer, when sharp temperature contrasts form between California's hot interior and the cold Pacific Ocean. In late spring, inland temperatures can climb toward 100 degrees, while Cape Mendocino, along the coast, hovers in the upper 40s. That thermal divide creates a steep pressure gradient that fuels relentless north and northwest winds. These winds, guided by the North Pacific High, also help generate the dense marine layer and summer fog familiar to Bay Area residents. 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People unfamiliar with the area will try to round the Cape and just get beat up. They have to pull into Humboldt Bay and wait until the winds let up enough to safely pass.' In winter, the pattern shifts. Instead of pressure-driven north winds, powerful low-pressure systems sweep in from the Gulf of Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, triggering brief but intense southerly gusts. These storms can deliver serious wind impacts, but they are shorter-lived and less consistent than the prolonged blows of spring and early summer. The Chronicle's analysis relied on hourly wind gust data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, known as reanalysis data, which blends direct observations with weather modeling. We calculated the strongest gust recorded each day and averaged those over 30 years, from 1991 to 2024, to provide a comprehensive picture of wind behavior statewide, pinpointing the Cape Mendocino area as the consistently windiest place in California. There are limitations, however. The dataset's resolution is relatively coarse, which means it may not fully capture the nuanced influence of California's complex terrain. It also doesn't include data from newer ground-based weather stations installed by Pacific Gas and Electric Co., potentially missing localized wind extremes. Some individual locations have recorded stronger isolated wind gusts. California's highest-ever recorded gust, a remarkable 199 mph, occurred at the Alpine Meadows ski resort in the Lake Tahoe area in February of 2017. But this extreme reading reflects a single event. Pape, of the Shelter Cove Fire Department, confirmed it gets seriously windy at Cape Mendocino. 'We've had what folks around here call little hurricanes. Trees falling into power lines, roofs torn off, people getting evacuated,' he said. 'It's not every week, but when it hits, you remember.' Cape Mendocino residents and local officials have been grappling with the reality of relentless gusts. 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CBS News
2 hours ago
- CBS News
Flooding possible as storms return to North Texas on Wednesday
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