Hardest Hit Areas of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula Just Saw 4-5 Feet of Lake Effect Snow

The winter of 2024 has started out with a wallop for many communities across the Great Lakes with a lake effect snow machine seemingly running on full blast. It was enough for the National Weather Service to proclaim, "Snow-ly cow!"

National media has been covering areas off the Lake Erie coast like Buffalo. Getting less attention are the persistent lake effect bands that dumped feet of snow across Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

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Over the course of five days between November 30 and December 2, 2024 the central Upper Peninsula saw snowfall equivalent to many people's heights. The NWS shares:

Snow-ly cow! We crunched the numbers, and here's a preliminary 4-day observed snowfall map valid earlier this morning. This map highlights the northwesterly lake effect snow belts well, with parts of Alger/Luce seeing over 3 feet.

The National Weather Service in Marquette did the math and found an pocket of the Central UP east of Munising saw 48 to 60 inches of snow, or 4-5 feet.

The highest directly measured snowfall occurred in Munising which received just over 35 inches. Inland south and east of Munising, say areas along the very sparsely populated Seney Stretch were in that bullseye for much more.

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Meteorologically speaking, it makes sense with Munising being the southernmost point on Lake Superior so the winds that cranked up the lake effect event had lots of open water from which to collect and then dump once it hit land.

From WLUC-TV, here's what it looked like in Munising.

Many took to social media to share what they experienced:

It's really settling up here in the hills above munising but we got hammered. Still need a endloader to push everything back because it's early, superior is warm, and we are going to have a winter....Already shoveling roofs.

The winter of 2023 was a light one. How's the difference between years? The Munising Visitors Bureau estimates they got more snow in this single storm than all of last winter.