NESIS rating for 29 Oct storm?

[ORH_wxman]

Understood but what would you say about the first part of my reply.......what NESIS would an ice storm get that does that same amount of damage across the same swath as this past storm? If NESIS does not measure social impact then my hypothetical storm should get the same number......and my guess is that it wouldn't is all I was saying....

NESIS is a snow scale...so an ice storm would get no rating or an extremely small rating if there was snow on the northwest fringe of it.

[ice1972]

Thanks got it...was just reading more about it...Seems maybe there needs to be a separate scale that can easily assign a rating based on dollars worth of damage or something along those lines....cuz as we've seen 10" in October can have a much greater impact than 10" in January.....it would meh in January....

[JBG]

But that's not what happened in my area (BWI). It was all rain, with just a few brief periods of sleet and snow flurries mixed in that never accumulated in the first place.

Oh O.K. That's a frequent error.

[JBG]

Pretty sure that NESIS is based on snowfall amount correlated with population. Thus interesting storm aspects like wind, cold, ice, tree damage, power outages, are not figured in. Trying to include some/most/all of those might make the system too cumbersome and time-consuming to be feasible, but that's merely a guess. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

When you actually read the early parts of the Kocin book, much is made about the importance of Northeast storms because of their impact on large numbers of people. Perhaps there should be two indices; one purely based on snowfall juxtraposed to population and the other taking into account societal impace from collateral factors as wind, power outages, tree damage, etc.