NorthShoreWx

I'm heading up to Kingston for an event this evening. I assume the thruway will be no worse than wet. Any intelligence to the contrary?

This response is about my perception of the usefulness of that graph. When I look at that data series, I see a series of ups and downs in an overall declining trend for much of the period, but that trend reversed in the past several decades. This chart gives me no confidence to predict what comes next The most obvious answer about how it is misleading is that the straight line on the graph represents a non-linear series. If we were to start the data series at 1980, it would be an increasing trend, not decreasing. Another way to look at it is that if extrapolating the trend lines forward there is a high probability of it being wrong. Anecdote: I literally ran a regression using the same data back in school in 1982 (using NYC snowfall 1870 - 1980). I wish I still had the greenbar it was printed on; that would be a trip. Extrapolating the line forward indicated that NYC snowfall was decreasing and would have fallen to zero prior to the present time. Considering 1980 to 2025 to be a short term trend and 1869 to 2025 to be a long term trend is subjective. Snowfall in the 1700s may have been higher than in the 1800s, but years prior to that may have been lower than it is now. There was a lesser amount of warming prior to 1980, and snowfall changes in that period were more likely "natural variations", yet figure prominently in the existing trend line. Personally, I don't know if snowfall is or isn't rising. I am confident that winters have gotten warmer. Warmer winters leading to less snowfall in our region seems intuitive, but so far we haven't seen any actual evidence. Edit: I just found the old greenbar printout mentioned. Damn, I saved a lot of old stuff.

The trend line is misleading. It compares the past couple of years to the 1800s. What does that look like if you start the chart in 1980?

Not having wind was the key. We had a breeze off the sound all night and were about the only place in the island that didn't get below 20 (although technically we did if you have confidence in the 19.9° that my sensor reported). Without that breeze, the low single number dewpoints would have resulted in much lower temperatures IMBY. Orient has around 18 miles more latitude, but that usually means nothing under high pressure. It's all wind, elevation, and water exposure (or a combination). For those less familiar with LI geography, Orient Point is 2 or 3 miles farther north than Suffern NY. Roughly on a line with Ossining and Bridgeport.

Last sighting seems to be October 21. Hopefully its not due to health or family problems.

It's who we are.

More inland helped. Even the south shore of Nassau was colder. Rare for us to be warmer than NYC absent an early season cutter.

We were busy sucking heat out the sound all night. Low here was 20. Wind stayed up all night. Water temperatures now into the high 30s/low 40s.

Is this RIC or ORF?

Is this because we stopped getting smaller storms or because some of the same storms got bigger? More of a rhetorical question because I have no idea how one could answer it. Is there a way to look at annual snowfall totals net of NESIS storms?

The leaf blowers never stop here. Green grass, ice storm, deep snow cover, nuclear winter; it doesn't matter. The sound of leaf blowers here is analogous to the sound of rushing water near Niagara falls.

Today's high temperatures have already occurred. They were above freezing for just about everyone.

Most places in this region are going to have above freezing max Ts on Monday. Maybe 40⁰ in NYC area. Temps in the wee hours are rising ahead of the Arctic front.

Driving home around 9PM last night on the LIE in eastern Nassau County we encountered a blizzard of salt. It continued until we passed the spreader which was salting the highway for some unknown reason. This was traditional rock salt, not brine.

No dustings here, but I did see a few sorry looking wet flakes mixed in with a quick shower that passed through around 8:30 this morning.

The last snowplow blade:

Well said. Didn't realize this board was around 100 years ago. And we still have some original members

So almost half of the years since 1955 skewed perspective?

100% I thought the winters sucked because we never got snow days (except for 1978) and precious few big snows, but I think we had more days with snow on the ground, the ponds were safe for skating, etc. Even with changeovers, more of them had snow remaining after it refroze than has been the case this century. Not to say that there haven't always been some epic washouts, but I remember some of those genuinely sucky winters as being more wintry,

I just remembered that I bared my soul on this 15 or 20 years ago on my website. The page is still there. Some of this will probably have changed (and the MS office versions definitely have), but it's a reasonable representation of my unsound methods: https://www.northshorewx.com/Utilities/ClimateTemplates.html

That would work, but then I would have to continually manually update formulas in many columns in multiple worksheets with the hardcoded number of years. The summary, average and record sheets already require a fair amount of exactly that each year. I'm sure there's a better (less manual) way but I always seem to have higher priorities. I use the NY standard "T". It also stands for Tariff

Total rainfall here was 1.21" ending as a brief period of non-accumulating light snow after midnight. The difference between the 4" gage and the ambient was significant; 1.21" in the bucket vs 1.51" with the Ambient. 1.21" stands. If it had been all snow, that would have been some nasty wet slop

I have that problem with the excel files I maintain for my climate records. For my monthly snowfall summary ( https://www.northshorewx.com/ClimateData/SmithtownDailySnowfall.pdf ) I have a 0 for months where there were traces so that the averages don't get messed up (excluding October and May where the average is 0). I keep sheets with the daily data including traces, but I can't calculate an average value for a given date (e.g., December 3) because of all the years that have a trace on that date. As a result, the difference between the actual average seasonal snowfall and the sum of the daily averages for the season in excel is significant; 36.2" vs 41.0"

TLDR: Yes, that's what I would do. To my knowledge, but with low confidence, there is still the "greatest depth in 24 hours" thing. There's so much noise and conflicting guidance on the web, including between different NWS pages, that its near impossible for us mortals to be definitive. Plus, there's different standards for airports/ASOS sites and other users. Not sure if COCORAHS, coops, mesonets, and spotters get the same guidance either. And then there's the measure only at set times sites (cue cpcantmeasuresnow). It's mayhem. I've gone back to resetting at phase changes or between unusual events like separate snowfalls in the morning and evening. Just seems like common sense to me. Otherwise, I do wipe the board at midnight (once per day). I'm amenable to updating my methodology if someone can convincingly show that I'm not doing it correctly.

I think the Dec 1 - 10 mean and median calcs are off. Eyeballing the list, they should be in the 3" range.