IRON MOUNTAIN — A storm that was expected to steer south of the Dickinson County area could deliver 1 to 3 inches of snow today, far less than the 3 to 7 inches predicted for Wisconsin’s Fox Valley, National Weather Service forecasters said.

AccuWeather is predicting higher storm totals — 3 to 6 inches locally and 6 to 10 inches to the south.

At Iron Mountain-Kingsford, NWS forecasters expected snow as early as 5 a.m., ending by midnight. A high near 25 degrees is predicted with an overnight low around 7.

Sunday should be mostly sunny, with a high near 20 and a low around 1. That trend might continue for a few days, with seasonable highs and frigid lows. Tuesday night’s expected low is minus 10.

For the Midwest, an overall stormy pattern could continue past mid-month, forecasters say. “The storm this weekend is just the next in a series of storms that is part of the pattern change that began late last week,” said AccuWeather senior meteorologist Joe Lundberg.

While this storm’s path is through central Wisconsin, previous storms have held closer to Lake Superior. Snow depth at the end of January at Iron Mountain-Kingsford was a mere 3 inches. That compared with 9 inches in the Marquette area, 8 inches at Ironwood, 10 inches at Baraga and 6 inches at Manistique.

Total snowfall during January at the Iron Mountain-Kingsford Wastewater Treatment Plant was 6.1 inches — more than 7 inches below normal. There was 6 inches of snowfall in December and 2.3 inches in November, putting the season’s pace about 17 inches below average.

Liquid-equivalent precipitation in December measured 0.77 inches at Iron Mountain-Kingsford, which was 0.4 inches below normal. Currently, there is moderate drought across most of northern Wisconsin and bordering Upper Peninsula counties. Conditions are abnormally dry in Menominee County and northern Iron County.

Temperatures in January at Iron Mountain-Kingsford averaged 14.2 degrees, which was 1.3 degrees below the average for this century. The highest reading was 45 degrees on Jan. 30, a new record, while the lowest was minus 20 on both Jan. 21 and Jan. 22.

The long-range forecast through April from NWS is neutral on temperatures in the U.P. but slightly favors above-normal precipitation. The forecast is driven in part by La Nina, a periodic cooling of sea-surface temperatures across the east-central equatorial Pacific.

During a La Nina year winters are often cooler and wetter than normal in the Midwest, but this La Nina is expected to be short-lived.

“There may be more variability within the season given the forecasted weakness of the event,” NWS forecaster Johnna Infanti said.

Despite frequent blasts of arctic air in the U.S. during January, the European climate service Copernicus said the month globally was 0.16 degrees warmer than January 2024. That month had been the previous hottest January globally on record, said Samantha Burgess, strategic lead for climate for the weather agency.

The U.S. is a tiny fraction of the planet’s surface, Burgess told the Associated Press, and “a much larger area of the planet’s surface was much, much warmer than average.”