The next 36 hours or so will bring us our biggest snowfall event of the season so far! Your weather timeline takes you through it and into Thursday:

Des Moines has seen around four and a half inches of snowfall for the WHOLE WINTER season so far, and we’ll likely more than double that with Wednesday’s event.

The regional snow depth graphic below should look at lot different by Thursday morning. Here’s what the snow on the ground looked like Tuesday morning:

Cold temperatures and atmospheric conditions will combine to raise our snow ratios and give us a fluffy snowfall starting Tuesday night.

This will be a fairly long event, with snow falling from the early morning hours Wednesday into the mid-evening hours in some areas, as seen in the animation below:

I’ve inserted the snowfall output from four different computer models below. You can see that there’s a fair amount of agreement between them, giving us more confidence in our forecast.

Below are snowfall estimates for the Des Moines area by Wednesday evening. We think a range of four to eight inches is a good bet.

Not surprisingly, a winter storm warning has now been expanded farther north into Iowa. A winter weather advisory will also be in effect farther north and west.

We have two more snow events on tap in the 7-day forecast. One comes Friday evening into Saturday, and the second will come Sunday night into Monday morning. We’ll be updating you with snowfall forecasts for those events as the week progresses. The animations below give you an idea regarding timing:

Highs for the next six days can be found below. The extended forecasts that follow again keep us in below-average temperatures in Iowa. Snowfall looks to be near-normal during the 6-14-day timeframe.

Your WHO 13 7-day forecasts follow. Be careful tomorrow!