The Allsnow Blizzard of 2026

[Rjay]

1 hour ago, liwxfan said:

Not even close to 2013 in north central suffolk.  Thought this had a chance but fell pretty short.  This was a great storm tho. 

North shore was a little rough in central Suffolk 

[dmillz25]

21.1” total. 45.8” season to date. A- winter for me

[Rjay]

26 minutes ago, jm1220 said:

The last time I was in a 20”+ snowstorm at my house was probably PDII 2003. Boxing Day 2010 was close, may have been 20” in Long Beach but I think the local observer had 18”. Where I live now generally does well in the winter and gets the higher end but never jackpots in a big storm. 

Being in Texas for 2016 sucks but at least you know for sure there will be a big one in 2036.

[NorthShoreWx]

6 minutes ago, jm1220 said:

Long Beach by the photos got 20” easy today and had heavy echos lingering around there for hours. Unfortunately the sound enhancement favored just the south shore today like Jan 2022. 

I'm not sure it was sound enhancement.  It had the appearance of the opposite.  Bands came down through CT, vaporized over the sound and regenerated within spitting distance south of here, as if we had a dome overhead.  I suspect the meteorological explanation for this would be fascinating.

[allgame830]

Damn did 4 houses today with my son! Hard labor! 3 more tomorrow! Big money to be made out there with these storms! 

[Rjay]

23 minutes ago, NorthShoreWx said:

This!

The only 20 inchers since I've been here (since 1995) are 1/1996 (22") and 2/2013 (27").  A bunch of near misses though, including today.

Boxing day was 12" here, PDII was 19".

Funny thing about '96 is I don't think I had 20" with that one while almost everyone else did. I was a young teen and it was my largest snowstorm at the time.  My area never jackpotted anything.  So naturally I moved to the place that had 13" of rain in 3 hours and that gets hit hard by every CCB.

[jm1220]

16 minutes ago, Rjay said:

Being in Texas for 2016 sucks but at least you know for sure there will be a big one in 2036.

Yep. I’ll set my alarm for it. Seriously, missing this sucked but 17” IMBY isn’t historic. That’s about what I got on 2/1/21, another storm where I did well but not the jackpot. 

[jm1220]

14 minutes ago, Rjay said:

Funny thing about '96 is I don't think I had 20" with that one while almost everyone else did. I was a young teen and it was my largest snowstorm at the time.  My area never jackpotted anything.  So naturally I moved to the place that had 13" of rain in 3 hours and that gets hit hard by every CCB.

When I lived in Austin it was the rain jackpot. May 2015 was the most rain I’ve ever seen in a 30 day period in my life. October 2015 from the Patricia remnants most I saw in a day. And the severe weather was bad. I was in Austin on Memorial Day weekend and JUST missed a massive hailstorm that hit the east side of town-2 foot hail drifts. I flew out 3 hours before it hit. 

[dmillz25]

Just saw that Fall River, MA got 41” ?! Wow

[Nibor]

2 minutes ago, dmillz25 said:

Just saw that Fall River, MA got 41” ?! Wow

I believe it. Southeast mass just been getting brutalized by this storm. 

[Nibor]

Full storm radar

[psv88]

Sucks I missed this one. Going with local reports of 24” in Commack, so 56.8” of snow on the season. Not bad!

[jm1220]

9 minutes ago, psv88 said:

Sucks I missed this one. Going with local reports of 24” in Commack, so 56.8” of snow on the season. Not bad!

Argh. Can’t be 17” that I missed here vs 24” you missed there. I’ll take the conservative I guess. 

[psv88]

6 minutes ago, jm1220 said:

Argh. Can’t be 17” that I missed here vs 24” you missed there. I’ll take the conservative I guess. 

Tight gradient in western Suffolk. Babylon got 28-30”. I’m confident Commack was 24” range based on reports from Nws, friends, family. Those snow bands hugged the LIE and maybe 2 miles north of there. 

[Roger Smith]

Daily climate reports are out now, no changes in earlier (in some cases questioned) totals except that annoyingly EWR is up by 0.1" (17.1" 23rd now for 25.2" storm). This means several minutes of needless work over in the contest thread.

I don't know what to say about NYC staying at 19.7" unless it's some voodoo logic like we cleared the board at 4 p.m., measured, and then by 7 p.m. there was nothing on the board that we could see from a distance. Any kind of logic would tell you the earlier 10.9 daily (+8.8 22nd) should be raised towards 12" and a 20.8" storm total. But whatever, it is what it is (not). 

[Roger Smith]

I have just seen the new CF6  tables through Feb 23 and no changes were evident, totals are still NYC 19.7, LGA 22.5, ISP 29.1, JFK 20.1, EWR 25.2 

[Volcanic Winter]

8 hours ago, MJO812 said:

This was 0z gfs on Tuesday.  Insane how it kept the same solution or tweaked it .

The GFS was lights out on this storm and it’s amazing to me. It was at best frustrating throughout the rest of winter but it saw this storm and never lost it, never compromised the outcome and just kept full steam ahead with NAM 2016 energy. 

Taking this with the usual AI grain of salt but GPT-5 explained it that the Euro’s verification scores have the most to do with H5 synoptic performance and that sometimes the GFS is better able to resolve northeast coastal systems at lead. 

Good but, it’s not like the GFS did great to my memory with the other systems this winter, it was all over the place IIRC. 

Seems like it’s becoming more difficult to parse which model has the best read for any one event. 

Edit: Here’s my Garmin Instinct 3 barometer log throughout the storm just for fun

[bluewave]

This was one of the better measured snowfalls considering all the drifting. It also highlights how these narrow deformation bands can cause significant variation over a very small distance. You can see the spread between the airport at Newark and the Harrison coop. Central Park was nearly identical to the Greenwich Village measurement

After looking at our snowfall over the years some things stand out. Most snowstorms drop the heaviest snow either just west of the NYC-LGA-JFK corridor or to the east across Long Island. 2016 and 2006 were the rare times the heaviest snow was centered at one of these stations.

My guess is that the northwest wall of the Gulf Stream to our east provides the natural focus for the very deep lows that track near the benchmark. Terrain interaction with the coastal fronts also lead to a snowfall secondary snowfall maxima somewhere over NNJ into Orange, Rockland, or Westchester.

Weaker storms with marginal temperatures often favor areas to the west of NYC. So this has lead to mostly Islip and secondarily Newark for the snowfall leaders among the major observation sites.

Greenwich Village            20.4 in   0230 PM 02/23   Public               
Central Park                 19.7 in   0100 PM 02/23   Official NWS Obs     

Newark Airport               27.2 in   0200 PM 02/23   Official NWS Obs   
Harrison                     18.0 in   0445 PM 02/23   CO-OP Observer  

[suzook]

5 hours ago, psv88 said:

Tight gradient in western Suffolk. Babylon got 28-30”. I’m confident Commack was 24” range based on reports from Nws, friends, family. Those snow bands hugged the LIE and maybe 2 miles north of there. 

Ironically friends I have in lower Stony Brook off 347 got 26 inches, while 2 miles north by rt 25 got 19. Crazy. I remember the storm in 2013 I think it was, rt347 was the jackpot zone with 33 to 37 inches while 2 miles in either direction had more than a foot less.

[bluewave]

49 minutes ago, Volcanic Winter said:

The GFS was lights out on this storm and it’s amazing to me. It was at best frustrating throughout the rest of winter but it saw this storm and never lost it, never compromised the outcome and just kept full steam ahead with NAM 2016 energy. 

Taking this with the usual AI grain of salt but GPT-5 explained it that the Euro’s verification scores have the most to do with H5 synoptic performance and that sometimes the GFS is better able to resolve northeast coastal systems at lead. 

Good but, it’s not like the GFS did great to my memory with the other systems this winter, it was all over the place IIRC. 

Seems like it’s becoming more difficult to parse which model has the best read for any one event. 

Edit: Here’s my Garmin Instinct 3 barometer log throughout the storm just for fun

Yeah, the GFS was #1 back to last weekend with the longer range forecasts and the AIFS was #2. In the shorter range it was the SPC HREF that did the best. For consistency across the entire season the best scoring models have been the AIFS and EPS AIFS. So it’s good to see the AIFS not having the suppression bias of the OP Euro and EPS with East Coast storms.  

Andrew has written an excellent article below. I would be curious if the outstanding winter forecast from the Open Snow team which Andrew is a part of used AI for their winter forecast. They didn’t mention it in the write-up back in November but perhaps they have a seasonal AI model that they aren’t ready to announce yet.
 

https://opensnow.com/news/post/november-update-2025-2026-winter-forecast-preview

[ILoveWinter]

45 minutes ago, bluewave said:

This was one of the better measured snowfalls considering all the drifting. It also highlights how these narrow deformation bands can cause significant variation over a very small distance. You can see the spread between the airport at Newark and the Harrison coop. Central Park was nearly identical to the Greenwich Village measurement

After looking at our snowfall over the years some things stand out. Most snowstorms drop the heaviest snow either just west of the NYC-LGA-JFK corridor or to the east across Long Island. 2016 and 2006 were the rare times the heaviest snow was centered at one of these stations.

My guess is that the northwest wall of the Gulf Stream to our east provides the natural focus for the very deep lows that track near the benchmark. Terrain interaction with the coastal fronts also lead to a snowfall secondary snowfall maxima somewhere over NNJ into Orange, Rockland, or Westchester.

Weaker storms with marginal temperatures often favor areas to the west of NYC. So this has lead to mostly Islip and secondarily Newark for the snowfall leaders among the major observation sites.

Greenwich Village            20.4 in   0230 PM 02/23   Public               
Central Park                 19.7 in   0100 PM 02/23   Official NWS Obs     

Newark Airport               27.2 in   0200 PM 02/23   Official NWS Obs   
Harrison                     18.0 in   0445 PM 02/23   CO-OP Observer  

Yea CPK is rarely the winner in any storm but for moderate to large ones, it is also very rarely the loser as it sort of "benefits" from both east and west leaning BM  storms. That being said, CPK recorded 0.15 of precipitation from 1-4PM, why wasn't that counted as snow? It's things like that which frustrate me.

[WeatherGeek2025]

gm, whoever cleaned their car out today, you have more work today, the plows put all the snow back onto ur spots!

[donsutherland1]

The final precipitation for NYC was 1.92". The NBM came closest while many of the global models, especially the ECMWF and UKMET badly underforecast the precipitation.

The QPF and snowfall amounts were trimmed further by 6z on February 22. Some of the social media "forecasters" chased the models into a dead-end and missed the much larger magnitude of snowfall. As noted previously, social media (and increasingly TV) isn't a good source of credible weather information. Anyone can play forecaster where meteorological knowledge is superficial, hype reigns and verification is non-existent.

A potent clue that the "low-balled" idea was a bad one rest in the storm's forecast dynamics. Explosively deepening and super intense storms have very efficient and powerful dynamics that maximize snowfall. One saw such a case during February 11-12, 2006. The blizzard's dynamics outran the models and the forecasts. What had been expected to be about a foot of snow in NYC wound up being 26.9". Forecast amounts were increased several times when the blizzard was underway.  

The region experienced a top-tier blizzard.

Newark experienced its first-ever case of two consecutive days with 10.0" or above snowfall: February 22: 10.1"; February 23: 17.1". Records go back to May 1843.

In terms of verification, I had several large errors (4" or more outside of the forecast range), as the snowfall was far more intense in Islip and Providence than I had forecast. That intense banding was likely somewhere on Long Island and Rhode Island/southeast Massachusetts was not the issue. Placement of the banding was the issue for me. Even with today's mesoscale guidance, the placement of banding often isn't possible until the storm is underway and the banding is developing/has developed.

The NWS did a terrific job in its forecasting. Mount Holly's, Taunton's, and Upton's discussions and forecasts were outstanding in advance of the storm and throughout the storm.

Finally, the blizzard lifted winter 2025-2026 into a Top 25 place for New York City where records go back to Winter 1869-1870. Additional snowfall would lock in a Top 25-Top 30 ranking.

[Heisy]

Can someone please tell me what happened with the RGEM though? I was tracking it all Sunday into Sunday night. It busted dry everywhere, and we’re talking runs while the storm is happening. It almost looked like a glitch. Its hires version did better. Just for example here was the rgem/hires rgem 6z run for MA/RI. Ridiculous.

[Cfa]

I thought my 16-18” measurements were off when I saw ISP’s almost 30” report, but I’m over here by ISP now and you can see the difference, the piles and drifts are generally much larger.

Very difficult storm to measure, my numbers could still be off, I’ve seen similar totals reported close by, but also higher totals nearby. Very high impact storm either way.

[Stormlover74]

Already down to 10 to 12" snowpack. Amazing how the February sun and content of the snow is so different this time around

[Rjay]

4 minutes ago, Cfa said:

I thought my 16-18” measurements were off when I saw ISP’s almost 30” report, but I’m over here by ISP now and you can see the difference, the piles and drifts are generally much larger.

Very difficult storm to measure, my numbers could still be off, even though I’ve seen similar totals reported close by. Very high impact storm either way.

Crazy how widespread the 20"+ was with this storm in Suffolk. 

You can also see of areas around ISP with similar totals.

 

0310 PM 02/23   Cocorahs

...Suffolk County...
Central Islip                31.0 in   0140 PM 02/23   Trained Spotter
1 NNW East Islip             30.0 in   0140 PM 02/23   Fire Dept/Rescue
North Patchogue              30.0 in   0135 PM 02/23   Public
1 SW Babylon                 29.5 in   1124 AM 02/23   Amateur Radio
Islip                        29.1 in   0100 PM 02/23   Official NWS Obs
1 WNW Holbrook               29.0 in   1200 PM 02/23   Public
1 W Nesconset                28.8 in   1243 PM 02/23
1 W Shirley Airport          28.5 in   0119 PM 02/23   Public
Bay Shore                    28.2 in   1200 PM 02/23   NWS Employee
Montauk                      28.1 in   1230 PM 02/23   Public
2 N Medford                  27.8 in   0300 PM 02/23   Trained Spotter
2 SE East Farmingdale        27.5 in   0330 PM 02/23   Trained Spotter
Remsenburg-Speonk            27.5 in   1013 AM 02/23   Public
Fort Salonga 1.5 SSE         27.2 in   0230 PM 02/23   COCORAHS
Orient Point                 26.5 in   0300 PM 02/23   COOP
1 SSE Quogue                 26.0 in   0934 AM 02/23   Public
1 NE Southampton             26.0 in   0250 PM 02/23   Public
2 NNW Islip                  25.3 in   0221 PM 02/23   Public
2 NNW Lindenhurst            25.0 in   1139 AM 02/23   Fire Dept/Rescue
2 ENE Shinnecock Hills       25.0 in   1114 AM 02/23
Bay Shore                    24.7 in   1230 PM 02/23   COCORAHS
Lindenhurst                  24.3 in   0300 PM 02/23   Public
4 WSW Davis Park             24.2 in   0200 PM 02/23   Public
Babylon                      24.0 in   1242 PM 02/23   Amateur Radio
2 NNW Ridge                  24.0 in   1000 AM 02/23   Trained Spotter
2 NW Southampton             24.0 in   0911 AM 02/23   Public
1 NNE Islandia               23.5 in   0100 PM 02/23   Public
Mattituck                    23.3 in   0130 PM 02/23   Trained Spotter
2 E Flanders                 23.0 in   0137 PM 02/23   Public
1 ESE Hauppauge              23.0 in   0330 PM 02/23   Public
1 S Islip Terrace            23.0 in   1130 AM 02/23   Trained Spotter
Islip Terrace 0.5 W          23.0 in   0900 AM 02/23   COCORAHS
1 NE Lake Ronkonkoma         23.0 in   1104 AM 02/23   NWS Employee
2 SW Middle Island           23.0 in   1014 AM 02/23
Selden 1.6 ESE               23.0 in   0130 PM 02/23   COCORAHS
West Islip                   22.8 in   0200 PM 02/23   Trained Spotter
Manorville                   22.0 in   0205 PM 02/23   Public
1 SW Shelter Island          21.1 in   1000 AM 02/23   Amateur Radio
1 SE East Northport          21.0 in   0200 PM 02/23   Public
2 ENE Ridge                  20.7 in   0124 PM 02/23   Trained Spotter
Oakdale                      20.5 in   0200 PM 02/23   Trained Spotter
3 WNW Riverhead              20.2 in   0630 PM 02/23   NWS Employee
1 ESE East Patchogue         20.0 in   0300 PM 02/23   NWS Employee
Nesconset                    20.0 in   0940 AM 02/23   COCORAHS

 

[weatherpruf]

5 minutes ago, Stormlover74 said:

Already down to 10 to 12" snowpack. Amazing how the February sun and content of the snow is so different this time around

since my dogs got used to walking on top of the other snow pack, they thought they could do the same this time, with disastrous results....poodle hair is like velcro for snow....

[CPcantmeasuresnow]

49 minutes ago, donsutherland1 said:

The final precipitation for NYC was 1.88". The NBM came closest while many of the global models, especially the ECMWF and UKMET badly underforecast the precipitation.

The QPF and snowfall amounts were trimmed further by 6z on February 22. Some of the social media "forecasters" chased the models into a dead-end and missed the much larger magnitude of snowfall. As noted previously, social media (and increasingly TV) isn't a good source of credible weather information. Anyone can play forecaster where meteorological knowledge is superficial, hype reigns and verification is non-existent.

A potent clue that the "low-balled" idea was a bad one rest in the storm's forecast dynamics. Explosively deepening and super intense storms have very efficient and powerful dynamics that maximize snowfall. One saw such a case during February 11-12, 2006. The blizzard's dynamics outran the models and the forecasts. What had been expected to be about a foot of snow in NYC wound up being 26.9". Forecast amounts were increased several times when the blizzard was underway.  

The region experienced a top-tier blizzard.

In terms of verification, I had several large errors (4" or more outside of the forecast range), as the snowfall was far more intense in Islip and Providence than I had forecast. That intense banding was likely somewhere on Long Island and Rhode Island/southeast Massachusetts was not the issue. Placement of the banding was the issue for me. Even with today's mesoscale guidance, the placement of banding often isn't possible until the storm is underway and the banding is developing/has developed.

The NWS did a terrific job in its forecasting. Mount Holly's, Taunton's, and Upton's discussions and forecasts were outstanding in advance of the storm and throughout the storm.

Finally, the blizzard lifted winter 2025-2026 into a Top 25 place for New York City where records go back to Winter 1869-1870. Additional snowfall would lock in a Top 25-Top 30 ranking.

Don, since this winter in NYC has jumped into the top 25 rankings when you can would you mind posting the top 30 per your rankings. 

[CPcantmeasuresnow]

1 hour ago, Stormlover74 said:

Already down to 10 to 12" snowpack. Amazing how the February sun and content of the snow is so different this time around

Funny thing about depth and snowfall totals. Providence where they had 38 inches has a max depth yesterday of 21 inches.