Taking one for the team

All of you snow lovers to the south of Duluth enjoying your winter bonanza, let me just say on behalf of all of us in frigid, low-snow Duluth: "You're welcome." See, it takes two ingredients to make a good snowfall, and we provided one of them. Without our help, it would have been a rainy day in Minneapolis, not the blizzard of the decade.

Snowfall takes two things: moisture and cold. The moisture comes courtesy of the Gulf of Mexico, or if you're in the South Shore lake effect zone courtesy of Lake Superior. The cold comes from the Arctic. Somewhere on the map there will be a line where the moisture meets the cold and...Shazam!...it's snowing. South of that line: snow. North of that line: cold. 

It's plenty cold here now. The sea smoke is roiling. The first and second days after a winter storm blows through, cold air from the Arctic continues to move in across the land, like a ghost of the mighty glaciers that once ruled this land.


Enjoy the fresh stuff, Twin Cities! This one's on us.