Now being a southern boy I don’t see many reports of snow on the weather channel. And so checking the weather for my planned trip up to Vermont reveals several days reports of “Snow showers.” I’m sure this is a silly question, but this just means it’s going to snow right? Not snow mixed with rain?
If it were January and I saw that, I’d be confident it was just a way of saying that it would snow. But since it’s March and possibly warming up, I wanted to be sure.
Snow showers = snow.
Just as rain showers = rain.
A partial mix would be rain/snow.
A full mix would be reported as ‘mix’ or ‘wintry mix’ (rain, sleet, snow)
Thanks, I knew it was a silly question but us Florida/Georgia kids only hear “Snow” and rarely “Snow showers.”
I am a Southern boy too (Louisiana) but I live in New England now. The terms confused me at first too. The coolest one that I have witnessed in “Thunder-Snow”.
The media has also started using the term monsoons, as in “monsoon season in the Rockies will bring…”
The term isn’t new, but its application to the US is something I haven’t heard until 2006.
The phrase “snow showers” does have an actual meaning, however. I suspect that the meaning changes from location to location, of course, but in Northern Ohio and Southern Michigan the terms generally have the following meanings:
snow storm: Persistent falling snow accumulating on roads across a wide area
flurries: (not furries) scattered light snowfalls, usually with no accumulation on the roads
snow showers: patterns of snow drifting across the region rather than a constant barrage blanketing the whole area. The addition of the phrase “occasionally heavy” indicates that in some places it will accumulate on the roads.
snow squalls: really heavy showers in which there will possibly be white-outs eliminating visibility while driving and in which adjacent areas will have wildy varying amounts of accumulated snow so that snow accumulation can differ by as much as several inches within a single mile of travel
sleet/freezing rain: nasty stuff that leaves a layer of ice coating everything. Sleet freezes before it hits the ground and freezing rain freezes after it hits the ground, but the results are pretty close to identical
blizzard: the NOAA and professional meteorologists have a specific definition of this word, involving wind speed, temperature drops, and accumulated snow. Real people and TV/radio weather personalities use it to mean any really big snow storm. (I have heard it used by people from outside the snow regions to refer to a simple heavy snow, but we don’t use it that way.)
tomndebb is right. Showers is different than rain. Showers indicates on-again off-again nature, so “Snow Showers” means occational snowing, not continuous. In my experience, rain mixed with snow is described with the ungainly term “rain mixed with snow.”
Actually, monsoon is an accepted meteorological term for weather patterns in the American Southwest.
Just by the by, in the UK “sleet” means “rain mixed with snow”. What you in the US call “sleet” (i.e. precipitation that melts and re-freezes before hitting the ground") we call “soft hail” or “graupel”.
…although in recent years, snow of any description seems to have become a thing of the past, in southern England at least 
Global warming? Possibly…
I concur with St. Urho. I grew up in New Mexico and we referred to the the summer months when we had frequent thunderstorms as the monsoon season. This was the late seventies and early to mid eighties.
The terms were new for me as well. (I’m originally from Houston, Texas, but somehow I ended up settling here in Connecticut.)
We had some pretty dramatic thunder-snow here last week.
It’s just one of Frosty the Snowman’s many private kinks. Needless to say it isn’t discussed much.