During a quiet moment last week in the office last week I
wandered a bit.
I wanted to see how
winter was going across other parts of the country so I surfed the web and
looked at National Weather Service climate reports.
It’s amazing how much you can piece together
from these reports.
You can do a little
CSI style detective work and figure out the winter storm track.
What got me going on this search was the snow total for the
season in Madison, Wisconsin
which is a seasonal record. They picked up another 6” of snow from a weekend
storm and they are fully 50” above normal for the season. When a looked around the rest of the Midwest I
found city after city with above normal snowfalls for the season:
Milwaukee +38”
Chicago +18
Rockford +30”
Green Bay +36”
When you put that together with our above normal
temperatures and below normal snowfall of the past 2 months the picture becomes
pretty clear. Areas of low pressure have
moved through the Ohio Valley
then west of Central New York. While we’ve been getting storms with snow,
sleet, freezing rain and rain these same storms have brought mainly snow to the
Midwest.
Here is a good story that explains why the big snows have
been falling over the Midwest. Part of it is tied into
the ongoing La Nina. The story is written by a meteorologist at the National
Weather Service-Milwaukee: http://www.crh.noaa.gov/crnews/display_story.php?wfo=mkx&storyid=13029&source=0
What may be a surprise, however, is that it’s been a snowy
winter not too far to our northeast over New England. Portland, Maine
and Concord, New Hampshire
are both well above normal for the season.
Burlington Vermont is pushing 100” of snow and that has to mean some
great skiing over the mountains of northern New England and even northern New
York (hint, hint Whiteface). Even though
Burlington’s temperatures have been
above normal the last 2 months (like us) their average is still about 4 degrees
cooler than Syracuse. They are
holding onto the cold air longer than Central New York
as these storms track to our west. That’s not to say northern New
England is immune from mixed precipitation. I found that the days with sleet or freezing
rain in Syracuse and Burlington
are similar (11 days versus 10 days).
We do think there will be a change in the pattern for Central
New York as we head into the late winter early spring. It’s not so
much based on our computer models more a pattern recognition from past weather.
We are going to detail that starting tonight at 11 PM on the TV side of thing.. If that’s too late we will re-run things
during The Morning News Friday morning.
