Video (4:00):
Good Thursday morning everyone!
As we’ve discussed the past several days, temperatures are on the rise today which will begin to melt the remaining snow pack in South Dakota and deplete snow cover in North Dakota and Minnesota. 
Spring-like temperatures will dominate today and tomorrow with nearly the entire region above freezing and highs in the 40s and 50s in portions of South Dakota.
However, things are going to quickly revert back to a wintry pattern into the weekend. As we have discussed in previous updates, a high impact winter storm is likely this weekend and into early next week. The GFS and European models are similar with the track of this storm but vary on timing and snowfall amounts. The past several runs by both models have slowly shifted the heaviest snow bands southeast. Areas of extreme southeast North Dakota are going to be near the line of a sharp cut-off between little precipitation to heavy snow. Here’s an animation of the latest GFS and European models. Note how much quicker the GFS moves this storm out. This will have a big impact on how much snow actually falls with this system.
Right now we’re leaning a little more towards the European, although it probably lingers snow in the region a little too long. As far as totals, we definitely see indications of a heavy band of snow in the region that could produce double digits totals. There have still been high run to run variability in terms of location and overall totals. We still think this is the region to watch for accumulating snow between Saturday and Monday. We hope to update tomorrow on more specific details as far as the location of the heaviest totals.
It is worth noting that we could see some strong wind gusts as snow falls Sunday night into Tuesday. This will likely create visibility issues at times and certainly make travel hazardous.
Luckily, there is not a huge arctic air mass to follow this system. In fact, our week 1 outlook is very warm at this point.
Have a great Thursday! We will update on the potent weekend system tomorrow.