Snow Event, Dead Ahead

Those wise in the ways of meteorology say that soon we will have snow we can trudge through -- would that be trudgable snow cover? -- here in northern Illinois. Blanketing the entire Midwest, in fact. One headline screams: BIG Snow Event Headed for the Midwest!

How many inches would that be? Three to seven here. I realize it hasn't snowed much this year, but that's only a mid-sized snow event. This is a BIG snow event.

But I guess it's about time. Weather.com tells me that "according to the NOAA/NOHRSC, a mere 15.8 percent of the Lower 48 States had snow on the ground Tuesday. Last year at this time, that figure was just under 62 percent."

I was interested to learn that NOHRSC, which needs a snappier acronym, is the National Operational Hydrologic Remote Sensing Center, an arm of the National Weather Service that does national snow analyses, among other things. It's headquartered in Frostbite Falls, Minnesota.

I mean, Chanhassen, Minnesota, which I'm sure is a lovely suburb of Minneapolis, but it would be more interesting if the organization that keeps track of the national snow cover, and which is a "remote" sensing center, was somewhere remote. On the shores of the Lake of the Woods, maybe in the Northwest Angle.