Second “Bomb Cyclone” Aiming For Midwest

Although we are expecting just a few inches of snow here in the Big Horn Basin in the next couple of days, the Great Plains could see round two of a weather pattern that devastated parts of Nebraska and Iowa last month.

Locally, melting snow has swollen waterways, and high winds sweeping across dry grasslands have already driven two fires in the region – one near Meeteetse on Sunday night, and another on southeastern Montana’s Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation, where a house fire sparked a blaze that quickly burned through 1,700 acres of dry grass and trees and forced evacuations in Lame Deer, Montana.

But forecasters say a storm system that is moving in from the Pacific Ocean is expected to intensify and form into a new inland “bomb cyclone.” Heavy, wet snow will fall from the Nebraska panhandle through south central and southeastern South Dakota into western Minnesota. But first, the storm is expected to lead to flooding in Idaho and western Montana, and dump up to 2 feet of snow in the mountains of Montana and Wyoming.

This would be the second such storm in less than a month. The March 13 storm caused massive flooding in the Midwest, a blizzard in Colorado and Wyoming, and produced winds of between 96 mph and 110 mph.