WNYLakeEffect

It's on a long lost hard drive of mine, but years ago I found a newspaper (NYT iirc) clipping from c.1900 describing a freak snowfall of something like 8" in 20 minutes along the shoreline in Wayne or Oswego county. It snowed so heavily that people outside at the time ran to the nearest house/barn/etc to take cover for fear of suffocating. I posted it here probably 10+ years back, but I can't find that post. Anyway, I've been living vicariously through BuffaloWeather's posts. I miss LES.

The sidebar on this site has another four webcams from a few miles west of Jamestown. They're not great at night, but it looks like the grass is covered.

Here's a spreadsheet of the KBUF obs from the less known analogues. Let me know if that doesn't work, I just want to avoid posting 70 lines of numbers.

Yeah, I haven't done anything in quite some time, but I still have all of the stuff saved at home. Some of the data (newspapers, COOP records) was either hard to find or process, but it's all out there. The Blizzard Book was a neat throwback -- many of the accounts of the storms it lists from before 1900 can be found on free(-ish) newspaper archives from the New York Times and Google. I based any of my maps from before the mid-90s entirely on COOP observations, which are inconsistent and geographically sparse, so they're very approximate. I'd do the maps differently nowadays. At the time, I overlaid multi-day totals on the map and tried my best to make contours that took into account the local tendencies and variations we experience. Later I attempted to create a mapping program in Python, but I was unsatisfied with the results (I needed to deal with way more data to make somewhat decent maps than my skills or time allowed, and it's really hard to make a program that considers local geography when plotting contours). It could absolutely be accomplished, though -- anyone that knows how to deal with masses of data, which can be pulled from databases in commonly used formats, could make a decent reconstruction of daily weather across the eastern US from 1893 to the present. I vaguely recall a product from some NOAA branch that sort of did this, but the execution wasn't exactly how I'd envisioned it. Someday I'll revisit everything and do it my own way.

My parents in Lakewood got around a foot overnight, about 15-16" storm total, and still snowing steadily. Definitely more than I expected, given that they don't have the best elevation.