Let it snow, let it snow, let it thundersnow

Although retired, Josef Podzimek, a UMR professor emeritus of mechanical engineering , remains an active student of atmospheric phenomena. The former researcher at UMR's Cloud and Aerosol Sciences Laboratory has been working with University of Missouri-Columbia student researcher Christina Crowe and a couple of graduate students to figure out how the phenomenon "thundersnow" may affect snow accumulation. Focusing on 22 storms, the researchers discovered that "within a 68-mile radius of thundersnow occurrences, 6 or more inches of snow fell 86 percent of the time, 10 or more inches fell 45 percent of the time and the maximum accumulation in the Midwest that date was recorded 36 percent of the time." The study will be published Friday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.