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25–27 January 1978 · THE WEATHER SERVICE'S OWN HISTORY
The benchmark storm of this ground's life is the Blizzard of 1978, and the weather service's history of it is a record of records. The winter of 1977–78 was, at South Bend, the coldest and snowiest on record: 136.3 inches of snow for the season, 86.1 inches in January alone, and a snow depth of 41 inches standing on 30 January — the figures of the National Weather Service's Northern Indiana office history. The storm itself, 25–27 January, drove the barometer to 28.82 inches on the 26th, an all-time record low pressure for the station, with snow falling at one to two inches an hour and winds of 35 to 45 miles an hour. The tellings at the region's other seats vary in the way honest tellings do — Notre Dame's history remembers 41 inches over three days, a January total near 85 inches, and drifts to twenty feet — and the range prints as a range rather than a winner being picked: the storm total at one station is not the depth at another, and both carriers are named with their numbers. For Olive Township the application is at county strength, and it is sufficient: a prairie township of farmsteads and a hill town, three days cut off by drifted roads in the coldest month of the coldest winter on record — the storm against which every later winter on this ground is still measured by the people who lived it. That is the benchmark, and the article asserts no township figure of its own, because no gauge kept one.
Sources:
- National Weather Service, Northern Indiana office, history of the 1978 blizzard (weather.gov/iwx) — the seasonal and monthly snowfall, the 41-inch depth of 30 January, the record low pressure of 26 January, the rates and winds; read for this section.
- University of Notre Dame, institutional history of the storm — the three-day fall and drift figures, printed as the second telling.