Snow is back in Bend.

Flakes began dropping Monday morning and didn’t stop until after dark that day, leaving the city covered in a thick, white blanket of snow — with more likely each day this week.

Monday’s dump — forecast as the most significant snow day storm — slowed afternoon rush hour traffic to a crawl, closed schools and brought out shovels and city snowplows after weeks of dry weather.

Snowplows were working until 11:30 p.m. plowing key routes around schools and hospitals, said Jacob Larsen, a spokesperson for the city. Plowing and deicing work started again early Tuesday as the city continued to monitor the snow.

Central Oregon was set to see another few inches on Tuesday, with snowfall picking up throughout the day and the brunt falling before midnight.

Less than an inch of snow is expected for Wednesday and Thursday.

“In Central Oregon we might still see some flurries by then, some moisture spilling over,” said Matthew Callihan, a lead meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Pendleton.

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Even so, forecasters were thinking about pushing back the winter weather advisory scheduled to lift by 10 a.m. Wednesday, at least for the eastern slopes of the Cascades, as the storm event would continue to pile snow on mountain passes, Callihan said.

Callihan said the weather system — an “atmospheric river” — is strong enough to pull warm, wet, subtropical air up from northern California, then drop it on the High Desert in the form of snow, thanks to a cold front sliding down across Washington and Oregon.

Because the storm is tapping into warmer air from below, it’s bringing snowfall periodically throughout the week, not all at once. That also makes it harder to predict, Callihan said.

“It’s not a steady stream,” he said. “It wavers, it moves.”

Callihan said temperatures will likely stay cold, with the possibility of snow early next week.

This week’s storm system hints at the La Nina prediction for cold, wet weather that meteorologists made in October but became less certain later on. Early snowfall built a healthy mountain snowpack, giving drought-weary farmers reason for optimism, though heavy snow has been mostly absent from Bend.