The Blizzard of 1978 · the winter that still measures all the others

25 – 27 January 1978, in the coldest and snowiest winter on record

The Great Blizzard struck a city already buried, and the Weather Service's numbers for South Bend remain the extremes of its climate record: The winter of 1977–78 was, in the Service's words, the coldest and snowiest on record at South Bend since 1893 — a winter average temperature of 19.7 degrees and 136.3 inches of snow, preceded by the snowiest autumn on record (30.6 inches). January 1978 alone brought 86.1 inches. Into that month, on the night of 25–26 January, came the storm: a low whose central pressure fell forty millibars in a day, snow falling at one to two inches an hour through the 26th, sustained winds of thirty-five to forty-five miles per hour, visibility at or below a sixteenth of a mile — and at South Bend an all-time record low pressure of 28.82 inches (976 millibars) on 26 January.

Governor Otis Bowen declared a snow emergency for the entire state on the morning of the 26th; the Notre Dame Observer recorded drifts of up to twelve feet, a university closed for three days — a closing its elders said had no precedent in almost sixty years — and a season total running to 149 inches by the month's end. Here the record requires its own correction, printed rather than smoothed: the figure "41 inches" travels with this storm in retelling — Notre Dame's published history says forty-one inches of snow fell in three days, and national summaries repeat it — but in the Weather Service's own record 41 inches is the snow depth measured on the ground on 30 January 1978, the deepest ever recorded at South Bend, not the storm's snowfall.

The daily ledger tells the storm itself: 15.6 inches on 26 January, about 24 inches across 25–27 January, with lake-effect snow adding more through the 29th; regional retrospectives put the whole event as high as thirty-six inches. Both figures stand, each at its source — the depth is the record, and the depth is what a city lives in: forty-one inches of snow on the ground, in a January that had already set the month's record, in the snowiest winter South Bend has ever measured.

Sources:

1. National Weather Service, Northern Indiana, "Northern Indiana Blizzard of 1978" — the winter of 1977–78 at South Bend (19.7° average; 136.3 in. of snow; autumn's 30.6 in.), January's 86.1 inches and the 41-inch snow depth of 30 January, the all-time low pressure of 28.82 in. on 26 January, and the storm's rates, winds and visibilities.
2. The Observer (Notre Dame), 31 January 1978 — the three-day closing and its sixty-year precedent, drifts to twelve feet, and the season's running totals as the campus paper reported them.
3. University of Notre Dame, "60 Milestones: The Blizzard of 1978" — the "forty-one inches of snow fell over the next three days" telling, printed here as the conflict the Weather Service record corrects; the daily snowfall ledger (NOAA data: 5.6 in. on 25 January, 15.6 in. on 26 January, 2.8 in. on 27 January) as compiled from the South Bend station record.