What happened to the "severe blizzard"?

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The National Weather Service's prediction of a major winter snowstorm--with up to 12 inches of precipitation and winds gusting over 50 miles an hour--obviously missed the mark on Thursday.  So what happened?

The short answer is that, even though forecasters said they had "high confidence" in their prediction, the storm track was different than expected.  That meant temperatures stayed above freezing Thursday and the precipitation in NE Iowa for the most part arrived as rain.

By 6:00 p.m. Thursday, the National Weather Service faced the facts, saying "Confidence is low on the storm impacting Northeast Iowa, given the track of this system is further southwest (than predicted), so we have left (Northeast Iowa) out of the forecast at this time.

A map of snowfall totals shows Kendallville received one inch of snow--but Decorah had no snowfall.