Join us for the STEAM Café this month! November’s STEAM talk, “Two to Twelve Inches: Forecasting Snow in the Black Hills”, will be presented by Dr. Darren Clabo, South Dakota state fire meteorologist and associate professor of practice in the South Dakota Mines Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering.

We’ve all seen snow forecasts on the news – predictions of “6 to 12 inches” are commonplace. We’ve all been surprised by the four inches on driveways and roads when our weather apps only suggest one inch, and we ask ourselves “Why the variability? Why can’t ‘they’ get it right? Is it going to be a snow day or not?”

Dr. Darren Clabo, South Dakota state fire meteorologist and associate professor of practice in the South Dakota Mines Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, will discuss the challenges of forecasting snowfall amounts in the vicinity of mountains. He will explore how snowfall forecasts are made and what challenges “they” (meteorologists) face when predicting snow accumulation specifically in Rapid City and the Black Hills, including how variations in ground temperature, air temperature, humidity, solar radiation, wind, atmospheric stability, local terrain, and precipitation efficiency, among others, all play a role in how much snow finally accumulates on the ground – and why a good forecast might be interpreted as being flat-out wrong.