Accumulating snow develops New Year’s Eve for many Michiganders

The southeast half of Lower Michigan will get a steady snow New Year’s Eve. It will be a relatively small amount of snow, but enough to cause slick conditions. The highly-populated area of far southeast Michigan will have Mother Nature’s confetti to ring in the new year.

Here’s the radar forecast showing a relatively weak storm system moving through the southern half of Michigan and northern Ohio and Indiana.

Light rain will develop Tuesday morning over the southern half of Michigan. The rain will switch over to snow in the second half of the afternoon. Light to moderate snow will fall over southern Michigan New Year’s Eve and wind down around sunrise New Year’s Day.

Here’s a good look at 6 p.m. New Year’s Eve. It’s a time that I think shows who gets snow and who doesn’t.

Snow will fall in the entire Detroit area, Ann Arbor, Jackson, Lansing, Kalamazoo, Flint, Saginaw and the Thumb.

Grand Rapids, Muskegon and Bay City will have a few snow showers but not a steady snow.

The snow amounts keep creeping up in the modeling, and I believe it. It looks like there should be a strip of two to four inches from around the Kalamazoo area to the Lansing area to the Flint area.

Here’s the latest and best computer model forecast for total snowfall through New Year’s Day morning. Where the rain changes to snow first will have the heaviest snow.

Ann Arbor and Detroit may have more melting and keep the snow amounts down to one or two inches.

From Grand Rapids and Saginaw northward expect less than one inch of snow, if anything. The Traverse City area and the snowbelt of northwest Lower Michigan will start to get light lake-effect snow toward sunrise New Year’s Day. Total lake-effect snow will total one to three inches on New Year’s Day in northwest Lower Michigan.