NorthShoreWx

2/13/2014

I assume it did not get that cold.

The reason it doesn't work that way is that when water freezes it releases heat. At 32 there is no where for the temperature to go but above freezing. The net effect is there is no net ice accumulation at 32 degrees. Rain falling on a colder surface would freeze.

It does and they do.

Point was about the difficulty in the freezing of heavy rainfall. Even in mid 20s there will be a lot of run off if it is heavy enough.

Need a steady inflow of low level cold air to acrete much ice with heavy zr falling. Any where near freezing and you quickly hit an equilibrium with melting and freezing due to latent heat release from the freezing process.. https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0434(2003)017<1016%3AMROFAM>2.0.CO%3B2

Not the first place I'd think of for the LI cold spot, although they were probably already iced in prior to that outbreak. I'll dig up what I had found if I get a chance later.

Old local newspapers refer to a number of spots around -19 , -20 in 1934. Don't know how accurate, but there were multiple such reports. 1934 might have been the colder outbreak though. Deep snow cover and radiational cooling contributed in 1961. Presumably there was some wind and more mixing (i.e., colder aloft) in 1934 for it to have gotten as cold as it did in NYC.

Walt's scenario is very similar to what happened on 2/2/1976.

December 7, 2003 Regrettably this was a week before I got my first digital camera. It may have been the reason I got my first digital camera. Good memories and stories from that, including being on the Kings Park Bluffs in blizzard conditions on the 6th and picking up a friend at ISP during strong winds and relatively light snow late in the evening on the 5th. He had moved from CT to FL a few years earlier and was blown away by the conditions walking across the parking lot to my car. That also gave me respect for small airports; air travel was severely messed up and that flight landed at ISP right on schedule despite strong winds and and snow and about 8" on the ground at that point. There wasn't much more snowfall overnight, but we ended up with 16" on the ground after part deux.

Upton on LI set their record low of -23 in January 1961. That's some crazy pipe cracking cold for these parts.

6C (above 0C), or about 43 fahrenheit

Appropriate follow up storm 2 months after the November Underforecasted Teaser Storm.

We managed to get squat here. Maybe a few minutes of snizzle.

I enjoyed that one. 14" here and we never got above freezing on north central LI. I remember being called a liar when I said we had freezing rain here while it was plain rain in OC. I still don't really understand how we got stuck in that bubble, but it was pretty cool. I stitched together some video (a little accuwx and Craig audio in the background) and a few stills...Here ya go:

Yikes. Hope you recover fully!

You don't just measure snow that way. The correct way is to take an average of more than one measurement. In this case you should have recorded 2.95". An even more accurate way would be to have taken a third measurement with the stick slanted in the opposite direction, add the 3 measurements and divide by 3.

Yup.

There was at least one: https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/winter-outlook-favors-warmer-temperatures-for-much-of-us

I was an organized little bugger. Maybe explains why I am a project manager now. There was no internet so you had to write things down if you wanted to refer back to them.

35" of snow after March 1 here. 36" at ISP, I think. Ran some averages for the past 10 winters. Quite a snowy period (2008-9 through 2017-18) 10 winter averages: Upton (BNL) - 47.8" ISP - 47.1" Central Park - 38.6" Smithtown - 49.0" Upton's good run continues, but it's tempered compared to a little further west over the past few years. Even ISP is almost caught up for the 10 year period.

Positive. Here is a handwritten log with a few observations from central park for that event on 2/2/1976.

One correction to my own post. I pretty sure there was a snow day on 2/2/1976. 2" of snow that started at 6am and ended at 9am, but the flash freeze that was involved made it a good call.

The school district I was in had no snow days between February 1969 and January 1978. Partly due to the lack of storms, partly due to storms happening on weekends and partly because the school districts were less paranoid about lawsuits then. I remember watching 9" of snow fall outside the classroom window in February 1975. We went home on a normal bus schedule as the snow was ending. I don't recall any undue drama around it. There would be months of outrage if that happened today. I'm not nostalgic for those years, but there's BS in 2018 life that sucks.

Watch it in Southampton: