Primarily during the pre-dawn hours of Thursday the 18th, most of the 30-county South Central Nebraska area picked up a minor, light coating of snow up to around one-half inch. However, the far southeast fringes of the local area, especially Nuckolls and Thayer counties, featured a more concentrated zone of higher amounts generally in the 1.5 to 3 range. Per a combination of NWS cooperative observers and NeRAIN observers, a few of the highest overnight totals featured 3.0 at Byron and also seven miles northeast of Superior, 2.6 in Superior, 2.1 in Bruning and 2.0 at Hubbell. Fortunately, light wind made this an almost ideal snowfall, as sustained easterly speeds only averaged around 5 MPH.
Timing-wise, the vast majority of accumulation occurred between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. as the Nuckolls/Thayer area resided along the far northwest edge of a larger snowfall swath of generally 2-5 that mainly targeted central and northeast Kansas. On the large scale of the mid and upper levels, this fairly low-impact event was driven primarily by broad isentropic lift focused along and north of a low-amplitude shortwave trough shifting across KS and toward the MO/IA border through the night, with only a fairly weak contribution from frontogenetic forcing. At the surface, the very light wind was fostered by a weak pressure gradient on the southwest fringes of a broad high centered over the Upper Mississippi Valley.