No we didn’t have several days to notice.
The first notice that we had of a winter storm was October 1st here in north central Wyoming. And the NOAA people weren’t talking much about huge accumulations. They just said “oh, we’re expecting an early snow. A couple inches as the temperatures go down in the impending rainstorm.”
That’s pretty normal in these parts. We get a little cold snap, and we get, oh, an inch to two inches of snow. It all melts the next day.
By Tuesday (10/2), they were repeating the same thing. They started adding warnings that trees could get coated with ice and wet snow as the temperatures dropped, and because the trees mostly had their leaves on (they’ve just started turning colors here in N/central WY at the foot of the Big Horns), the trees are fully loaded with leaves. NOAA and WX forecasters were predicting power outages caused by breaking trees and limbs on power lines.
Wednesday, they started waffling. The upped the watch to a warning. Still, the accumulations were modest in prediction - 3 to 8” above 4,000 ASL, with up to 18” in the mountains.
Thursday, they repeated the warning.
Thursday afternoon, the significantly upped the accumulation predictions AND - most significantly, they dropped the snowline elevations down to... well, whereever you were, you were going to get snow. The storm had slowed down - the change to snow happened about six hours later than forecast, but the accumulations went WAY up all of a sudden and the winds went way, way up as well.
By last Thursday night, the WX radio was starting to go off about every two hours, with changes to the prediction. The forecast area was rapidly growing. Previously, it had been mostly in Wyoming, from Cheyenne up to Billings, but the worst snowfall was predicted for the area north of Yellowstone (Livingston etc in MT). There wasn’t a huge snowfall package being put out yet for Rapid City.
Still... the prediction package wasn’t causing big changes in people’s plans. The NOAA people were not making it clear that this storm had the power to dump FEET (plural) on the flat grounds from Sheridan/Ranchester/Dayton east through Gillette and over to Rapid City.
Come Friday AM: It was snowing like a SOB. People poked their heads out and said “whoa - this ain’t the usual October skiff of wet snow” and schools started looking at the snow on the ground (which was already every bit of what was predicted for the 48 hour period) and school delays started. First it was “two hour delays...” then when 10AM came and went, and the snow was just coming harder, they cancelled - everything. But they waited until 10 AM to do it. By 10 AM, Buffalo, WY was completely cut off as WYDOT got out onto the roads and realized that they could not keep up. There were 18 wheelers stuffed into every parking lot in Buffalo up to Billings as the interstates closed tight as a drum, both north/south and east/west (I-90 east out of Buffalo to Rapid City). WYDOT was caught with lots of equipment out of position for a major storm as well.
People who don’t live in the mountain west think our weather is easily forecast. It isn’t. That’s why I carry a whole bunch of survival equipment when I’m out in the mountains hunting or even when I’m out on of town driving in winter. You never really know just how bad a storm can be. The predictions are usually wildly unskilled until about 12 hours ahead of time - and that is true for thunderstorms and tornado warnings in summer, too.
I spent a winter in Gillette once with a steel erection crew putting up a school. It was uncomfortable going to work in the morning. Especially that portion of the morning spent on my back under a forklift trying to position an old style blow torch on the oil pan.