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The benchmark winter storm of this ground's record is the Great Blizzard of January 25–27, 1978, and for once the local telling needs no boundary apology: a storm measured at the South Bend station is a storm Osceola stood in, there being no separate Osceola gauge and no reason in the meteorology to divide them. The storm — a low whose centre fell forty millibars in twenty-four hours, to 956 millibars over Michigan — changed from rain to snow in the predawn hours of January 26 and fell at one to two inches an hour through that day, on sustained winds of thirty-five to forty-five miles an hour with visibility at or below a sixteenth of a mile. South Bend set its all-time record low pressure that day, 28.82 inches. The storm's snowfall total at South Bend is printed in conflict, as the sources give it: a National Weather Service retrospective retelling gives thirty-six inches for the entire event, while the standard storm table gives forty-one inches — both figures stand, unmerged. What no source disputes is the winter around it, the coldest and snowiest at South Bend since records began in 1893: January 1978 alone brought 86.1 inches of snow and a measured snow depth of forty-one inches on January 30, with drifts reported to twelve feet; the winter (December–February) totalled 136.3 inches at an average temperature of 19.7 degrees; and calendar 1978 closed with 141.7 inches, still the station's annual record. Notre Dame closed for three days, the first such closing in living institutional memory. For Osceola, a town of plows, a volunteer fire department and one state-highway spine, the blizzard's local face is the county face — a community dug out by hand and by neighbour — and no Osceola-specific toll, death or damage figure exists in any source reached; the storm is told, honestly, at the station strength that covers the town whole.
Sources: National Weather Service, Northern Indiana — “Northern Indiana Blizzard of 1978” (the storm's course; South Bend's coldest, snowiest winter since 1893; January 86.1 inches; depth 41 inches January 30; record pressure 28.82 inches); NWS South Bend annual climate record (calendar-1978 snowfall 141.7 inches, the station record). Storm-total figures in conflict: thirty-six inches (Weather Service retrospective as republished) against forty-one inches (the standard Great Blizzard of 1978 snowfall table). Notre Dame Observer, January 31, 1978 (the three-day closing; drifts to twelve feet).