As you’ve noticed, very cold air poured over the state Wednesday night behind our snowfall and under clear skies. Temperatures will moderate a bit into Friday. Your weather timeline takes you into Friday and through the first two snow chances in our forecast:

It will be cold Friday morning, but not as cold as Thursday morning was. Still, we’ll see wind chills below zero to start the day. Bundle up! And get ready for what could be a tricky pick-up time Friday afternoon.

Snow looks to fall during the afternoon hours and into the very early evening on Friday, and will be accompanied by winds out of the SSE gusting to 30 mph. This will make for a challenging afternoon commute and could slow your drive to Valentine’s dinner. The image below shows our GRAF computer model’s snowfall forecast. The image following shows computer model snow total forecasts for the Des Moines area by Friday evening. Whether we get a half inch or two inches, driving will get dicey.

The first image in the gallery below shows the wall of snow approaching the I-35 corridor at 3 PM Friday. That snowfall should be done by evening. Then a trickier snow forecast comes our way Saturday. Snow could fall from the early morning into the early evening, but what makes Saturday’s forecast a tough one is that we could see one or maybe even two thin bands of heavier snow accumulation set up. These could be as little as a county wide and will create big snowfall total gradients over a small area.

An example of one of those gradients is below, from the HRRR model. This shows Boone, for example, getting 6.6″ and Ankeny getting 2.1″. We’ll continue to keep you updated as Saturday’s forecast will likely change.

Our third round of snow comes Monday during the afternoon hours. At this point totals look to be less than an inch by evening.

Turning to temperatures, it’s important to know that it gets very cold again starting Sunday. The extended forecasts following appear to keep us in below-average temperatures.

As always, your WHO-13 7-day forecast can be found here. Be safe and stay warm!