A major winter storm is still pounding parts of the Great Lakes Region and the Northeast on Saturday morning, with very heavy snow across IL, IN, Lower MI, and into Southern Ontario, and intense freezing rain across Pennsylvania, and New York State. 6-12+ inches have fallen or are expected to fall in the aforementioned heavy snow areas, with over 1/2 inch of ice accumulations in the warm sector where warm air is pumping northward over cold air at the surface. The national radar loop below from Saturday morning shows the storm in its entirety:


When first glancing at the RUC-forecast MSLP map below, it appears that the storm system responsible for this massive precipitation shield is rather weak, with a minimum pressure of 1007 mb. However, this cyclone is relatively intense when compared to the 1043 mb anticyclone to the northeast across the Canadian Maritimes!


The huge area of winter storm warnings and ice storm warnings is displayed below, with the latter extending all the way down to the mountains of North Carolina! Heavy snow is expected as far northeast as Quebec this weekend.


Shown below are pictures from the Ozarks of northern AR from yesterday courtesy of Heidi Farrar. Her location received a few hours of very heavy snow followed by sleet as the warm advection won the battle. Around 3 inches of snow fell there, with another few inches of sleet on top of that.



Below are pictures from Grand Rapids, MI from Saturday morning, which is under a heavy snow warning for storm total snow accumulations of 6-12 inches. Around 6 inches of snow fell last night, with much more on the way as the heavy bands associated with the deformation zone rotate through. These pictures are courtesy of SMT.