A Facebook post from the National Weather Service’s St. Louis office Sunday night took responsibility for a forecast that called for much more sleet and snow than actually fell in the area.

Clay Street in the snow / Photo by Roger Starkey

“Yup (sic)it was a bad forecast,” the message said. “Winter weather forecasting is by far the most difficult thing we do, and the models were almost no help this time.”

Up to eight inches of sleet and snow were predicted for the Collinsville area, but less than an inch of solid precipitation found its way to the ground in the Metro East over the weekend. The majority of precipitation in the area was in the form of sleet, which caused slippery roads in some places.

The Weather Service said “no continuity of observations over land” combined with “pretty bad” computer models to make predicting the storm difficult. The spokesperson noted that freezing drizzle from the storm contributed to numerous accidents along the Interstate 70 corridor in Missouri. The storm, with heavier impacts south of the Collinsville area, impacted people’s lives, the spokesperson said, including a co-worker, who was in a car accident on the way home from work Saturday.

The spokesperson said the Weather Services treats bad forecasts as learning experiences.

“We go back and analyze our performance on storms like these,” the statement indicated. “We try to figure out what went wrong and learn from it so we do better next time.”