Our winters here in Central New York can be quite long. The snow can start in early November and linger into April (some years it’s before Halloween and we’ve had snow around for May college graduations and Mother’s Day!) A closer look at the data shows its not one long snow fest but the seasonal snowfall is made up of 2 or 3 week spurts.
Take this winter as an example. For the first 2 ½ weeks of December we went great guns. It snowed just about everyday and over a 17 day period we had almost 4 feet of snow (45.4”) of snow. That short period accounts for over 40% of our seasonal snow total so far.
I went back over just the past few winters and found these streaks or spurts were pretty common.
Snowfall Season % Season Total
Feb 5-18 2007 14 Days 48” 140.2” 34%
Dec 1-17 2005 17 Days 45” 124.6” 36%
Feb 9-28 2005 20 Days 43.4” 136.2” 32%
Jan 11-31 2004 21 Days 69.1” 181.3” 38%
Personally I think this is just a graphic example of how we get ‘locked’ into a cold pattern here in the Northeast. While the jet stream is always changing and evolving on a day to day basis if you averaged out the jet stream pattern over these 2 to 3 week periods you would find one common denominator: all these spurts can be characterized by a trough of low pressure in the Eastern United States. While there are Nor’easters sprinkled in these time frames it looked like the majority of the snow came from lake effect snow.
I went back a bit farther in time and found the ultimate snow ‘spurt’ for Syracuse. It was during the middle of the winter of 1965-66 when over a 5 day period we had 47.4” This was during the Blizzard of 1966 and it accounted for an astounding 41% of the total snowfall that entire winter!
The Lake Effect Challenge for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society is now past $29 thanks to a couple mentions today (3/13/08). Y 94 DJ Kathy Rowe wanted to know if it was time to end the contest but given the pattern I was seeing through the end of the month I said we should keep it going a while.
