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January 28/29 Blizzard Observations/Discussion/Nowcasting


Northof78
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11 minutes ago, MANDA said:

Anyone agree with me on this?  I had said I thought this storm would rival blizzard of 78 in southeast New England.  While certainly not the long duration of that one snow totals were just slightly lower and winds were right in the 78 ballpark.  Some severe flooding from storm surge.  Again, not the duration of 1978 but in some aspects almost everything that happened in 1978 were concentrated into a 12-18 hour period this time.  I know this probably belongs in the NE thread but I thought it was interesting.

NYC and NNJ and interior spots were SO CLOSE to something more if sfc / upper air had just gotten together a little quicker.

Also, this storm should be a good lesson on Kuchera, 15:1+ ratios.  Heck I saw a pro met even suggesting 20:1.

Good storm and it was ALWAYS targeting CNJ, central / eastern L.I and SE NE with the big totals....sans the terrible performance by GFS.

No this was nowhere near as great as Feb 1978 was and I talked to a lot of NE people last night who were very unsatisfied with this storm, there were quite a few people who are upset they didn't get 20 plus inches of snow.  Also we must remember that snowfall totals in the current era are boosted because of the measuring method.  Feb 1978 was a far higher impact storm than this one was.

 

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Furthermore February 1978 was a MUCH more widespread and MUCH larger storm, remember that Mt Pocono got 30 inches with that storm, it still stands as that location's storm of record and it was a crippling blizzard all the way down to DC.  This event was like a grain of sand compared to the vast desert of Feb 1978

 

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1 hour ago, CPcantmeasuresnow said:

I' m not saying their total was egregious just off.

Let's first start with the basics, the Park reported 1.2 inches of snow on the 28th and 7.3 inches on the 29th which equals 8.5 for the storm. Simple math right? Yet they recorded 8.3 inches as a storm total. It was at least 9-10. If they can't even add 1+1 I don't trust they can stick a ruler on a snowboard and record amounts, a lot of times they don't. Years and years of experience with them has taught me this. The Conservancy helped for awhile but I'm not sure who's recording totals there this year.

And I think the 5.8 from the 7th was a bit low too. Most likely in the 6.5 to 6.8 range.

they left out the 0.2" that fell earlier in the day...they treated it as two seperate events...

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8 hours ago, Nibor said:

The snow that fell here never developed into good dendrites. I think our area if you looked at the DGZ was just outside of the best dynamics.

Exactly. I'm dumbfounded by people who are not in and around Manhattan gaslighting and saying it had to be 10" or more. It is powder, but a silky, denser powder. The kind you slip and slide on, nut crunching underneath foot. Is there anyone in Manhattan who can provide ground truth that there was more?

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12 hours ago, LibertyBell said:

The other reason that makes 8.3 suspect is that there was more than that north of the Park in the Bronx and also more than that just west of the Park in NE NJ

 

It was tough to measure but it avg 9" - 11" outside of snow drifts or bare ground areas. So I call it 10.5" matching the closest official place at LGA.

Around 8" is believable in the Park to me. For a while radar kept showing moderate snow bands not getting past a line from about Westchester sound shore areas, middle of the Bx, western Qns down to parts of BK. Those higher totals north of Midtown into the Bronx etc are more ENE or NE, not just North. Areas near the Hudson in NJ look comparable to Central Park, and places north on the Hudson side of Westchester County a little less.

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Re my earlier post of snowfall totals, I went back into the NWS documents where the CF6 is now also updated (I reported from the first appearance of daily climate reports) and found that with one exception, the CF6 documents have my numbers and not those quoted in the "NWS chat."

For ISP, the CF6 had adjusted the Friday portion from 1.2" to 1.5" ... otherwise all CF6 docs have the same numbers that I had seen in the climate reports. Not to say these may not change if the NWS chat is based on some later information not yet placed in the CF6. As of this time stamp, the ISP climate report for Friday 28th had not adjusted the amount shown in the CF6, it remains at 1.2". 

Will continue to monitor and edit any changes that I see into my post. I also checked the climate reports (none of which have any new editions posted) to see if they now say anything different, and none of them do. The now adjusted value for ISP is still in the current version of the Friday climate report. My work with the Central Park data base and various other official products has convinced me that there are two sets of official data that sometimes have slight variances in them, but when you go back further there are larger ones from time to time. I have no idea what's causing this to happen. Since I obtained the data from Don S, I asked him about checking into one recent discrepancy between data and product tables, and they changed the value we queried. Another one remains unchanged in the document (their CF6 for a recent Dec has a different mean temp than the document shows). Those were the only two months that had differences in the past 30 years, then you get into more frequent 0.1 F differences for a few decades, and then even larger differences especially in the period 1890 to 1910. Hoping to get answers one day as to why these exist, but anyway, it underscores the fact that "official climate data" can be maintained in two separate data bases by two different people or groups of people, and sometimes then their numbers don't match perfectly. The answer is to have one person maintaining one set of official records with no parallel sets of records. That is how the CET data are managed, and so there are never discrepancies between products, although errors can still happen and adjustments can still be made at later dates by that one person (I presume he has assistants but he's the sole authority on the integrity of data in that long-running data base). 

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54 minutes ago, hooralph said:

Exactly. I'm dumbfounded by people who are not in and around Manhattan gaslighting and saying it had to be 10" or more. It is powder, but a silky, denser powder. The kind you slip and slide on, nut crunching underneath foot. Is there anyone in Manhattan who can provide ground truth that there was more?

Yes. I run snow removal for a famous college on the uws and have been outside in and among every storm for the last decade. This was a 10” storm. I think it’s more of a psychological issue that the park didn’t record double digits. But as far as impact (drifts, road conditions and lasting power) this storm is pretty much a mirror image of 1/15. 

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9 minutes ago, LongBeachSurfFreak said:

Yes. I run snow removal for a famous college on the uws and have been outside in and among every storm for the last decade. This was a 10” storm. I think it’s more of a psychological issue that the park didn’t record double digits. But as far as impact (drifts, road conditions and lasting power) this storm is pretty much a mirror image of 1/15. 

Appreciate the ground truth, but I'd counter by saying that in about 2 hours of walking in Riverside and Central Park I never felt the snow was threatening to top my 8" bean boots. Maybe there was enough compaction... I agree on the impact - it's a colder, denser snow... I think the LE is what always drives that (memories of the 2007 storms in Boston that formed immovable glaciers).

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 I have my doubts about some of these snow reports. Someone from my town (Levittown, Nassau County) reported to the NWS we got 19.2 inches. I did a quick check last night about 7 and came up with 12-13 inches. Maybe I lost a little to wind or compacting by then but 19 seems to extreme. The town next to me reported 14.9 and that was by a NWS employee. That is probably about what I got. Can anyone just go out and measure and report it to the NWS? I think most people do the best they can at measuring but this storm was especially hard with all the wind.

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Just drove around western Suffolk. The difference between Huntington and Melville and Dix hills and commack is pretty substantial. Once you hit exit 42 on the northern amounts really go up. Looked like a solid 4-5” inches more in commack than Huntington. I could definitely see Huntington only getting 12’” or so. 

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This map is overdone is parts of Morris County. There were definitely places that got below 4". The screw zone has really set up over Hunterdon, Somerset, and Morris Counties so far this winter. These areas pretty much missed out on every event. Too far west for the two big coastal storms and too far south to stay frozen for the mixed event that hit Sussex and Orange County.

1105198993_SCREWZONE.png.c9af4b303a3c2d4e16fc1d214cc2bdde.png

 

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Worth keeping in mind that snowfalls are often 10% or so higher than resulting snow depths, as snowfalls are totals of six-hour measurements on swept surfaces, snow depths at end of an event will usually have some compaction. Sometimes the difference can be a greater percentage too. I have seen cases where snow depth exceeds snowfall, that is sometimes the case at arctic weather stations where snow blows into an area after a light snowfall and so the observer finds a greater snow depth than the previous time of measurement, not from the snowfall but from the drifting. 

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