Minnesota Could Be Dealing With A Lot of Extra Water!

Yeah, we have a lot of snow on the ground. And there's more rain on the way. So check out just how much extra water we could be dealing with in Minnesota right now.

With record snowfall in February after another bout with the Polar Vortex earlier in the month, we're not set up very well right now to deal with all this precipitation. That's because, underneath all that snow, our frost levels are still fairly deep, which means all this water from melting snow along with the extra rain we're getting really has no place to go-- it can't sink into the ground, so it's forced to just run off wherever it can.

And that's what's causing the flooding and standing water problems across Minnesota right now. According to Matt Benz, Chief Meteorologist at KTTC, Rochester received .67 inches of rain Tuesday night into Wednesday, while there was closer to an inch in Plainview, and over an inch in Kellogg.

But, it's not all bad news. While the ground is frozen, the 16-inches of snow we have on the ground right now will apparently act like a sponge and absorb some of that extra water, though, at least that's what this Star Tribune story says.

But to get an idea of just HOW much water all this rain and snow is, I turned to a friend of mine who's a meteorologist at a TV station in my hometown of Wausau, Wis. Mark Holley did the math on the Chippewa River basin in western Wisconsin, which has seven drainage basins and eventually dumps into the Mississippi River near Wabasha. His rough math said there could potentially be 827,914,598,400 gallons of water that'll head south when things finally melt!

No matter if it's rain or snow... THAT is a lot of water! Here's hoping the weather will warm up slowly so it can pass through without causing too much flooding!

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