I'll tell you what the "fake cold" is good for though, cooling surfaces down so that when it starts to snow it sticks better.
Many times the city will get snow, but we are sitting in the upper 30s waiting for precip to drag our temps down to freezing. Meanwhile several hours earlier some locations were radiating and cooled into the 20s while skies were still clear. That allowed for surfaces to cool down nicely so that even if temps did jump back to the mid 30s when clouds moved in, surfaces are not cooling down from being in the 40s because of solar insolation from earlier in the day, they are warming up from being in the 20s.
It makes a nice difference in terms of stickage.