According to The Winter of 95-96: A Season of Extremes, National Climatic Data Center, Hartford typically receives about 45 inches (114 cm) of snow in an average winter. The record seasonal snowfall was 115.2 inches (293 cm) during the winter of 1995–1996. Compare that to January 2011 which has so much snow that roof collapses are becoming a concern.
Seen above: New Haven, CT has declared a snow emergency.
WGN-TV’s Tom Skilling writes:
Hartford, Connecticut’s monthly snow approaching six feet!
The prolific snows which have hit the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast this winter–during January in particular–are without precedent. January tallies haven’t just surpassed previous snow records–they’ve obliterated them. In the New York City area, where an 8.1 inch total is considered normal to date, snow totals have reached 3 feet–at some locations, even more! Central Park’s 36.0 inch month to date tally has eclipsed the 86 year old previous record of 27.4 inches set in 1925. Records have also fallen at Newark (37.3 inches), La Guardia (32.4 inches), Bridgeport, Connecticut (41.8 inches) and Islip on Long Island (34.2 inches).
Among the most stunning of all the January snow totals close to the New York City area is the 56.9 inches which have hit Hartford, Connecticut. That’s four and a half times the city’s typical full-January total of 12.6 inches.
Word of the huge monthly snow amounts there comes just days after that area was hit by yet another snowstorm–a system which rode into New York on gusts as high as 49 mph. Snowfall at New York’s Central Park hit 19.0 inches as did tallies out of Clifton and Roselle, New Jersey.
The same lightning-laced snow system put down 15.1 inches in Philadelphia, 16 inches Jersey City, New Jersey and 11.5 inches at South Boston, Massachusetts. The Nation’s Capital measured 5 inches at Reagan National Airport.
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I have the same experience as Skeptic Tank. There has been minimal melting between storms. Here in Princeton, NJ, we have four separate layers of snow on the ground, with the piles at street intersections so high that you can’t see the intersecting traffic.
Is everybody sure Al Gore isn’t visiting NY at the moment.
David Falkner says:
January 29, 2011 at 2:11 pm
“I shook my magic 8-ball after asking what could cause such a thing, but it keeps coming up ‘Global warming’. Maybe I should market this?”
This sounds like the perfect basis for a new global warming cartoon with Mann stacking the magic eight ball with “global warming’ pyramids. Perhaps show him crossing things out like “solar variation” and “oceanic cycles.”
Sounds like the newest Alarmist toy. Do the globe with 8-ball guts. That way kids can ask any question about the state of the climate, and the answer will be the same.
Of course, we have to ensure that it’s made in China…
Because of certain changes in my Mother’s mobile home park regs, a storage shed had to be eliminated. It had 40 volumes of photo Albums covering the ’30’s, 40’s, 50’s,60’s,70’s,80’s,90’s and to current.
All centered around Minneapolis, Duluth, southern MN.
Many wintertime photos. Many dated…Dec/Jan/Feb/March.
None of them COMPARE to the current photos and amounts in Mpls, St. Paul.
Looks like this will be a record book year in MN.
Max
Mike says: “Why this there so much water vapor in the atmosphere? What could cause that?”
Little rain fairies come down from the moon. They lift the water up in their dew buckets.
If you believe in AGW, you should believe in rain fairies, too.
Mike (Why this there so much water vapor in the atmosphere? What could cause that?)
Perhaps all the aquifers pumped to the surface to evaporate?
Here is a letter I wrote about the Brisbanr floods. It was published in “The Australian
“Dear Sir,
I see that Bob Brown is blaming global warming and CO2 increases for the current Australian floods.
Now I am merely a doctor and not a climate scientist but I do know about floods in Brisbane. I survived the 1974 flood. I have 6 adult children all of whom have bought real estate in the Brisbane area. So we know the flood record.
Between 1840 (when the first records were taken) and 1901 there was on average one flood as big as 1974 every fifteen years
In the 20th century the climate changed (as it always does) and we have had two big floods in 110 years.
There were lots of floods in the 19th century.
I don’t think the had much in the way of global warming or rising CO2 levels back then!
It is sad to think that our current government is in coalition with the Greens and that every decision Julia Gillard makes has to be approved by Bob Brown.
Yours sincerely,
Jim Petrie
Bob Brown is the leader of the greens in Australia. He is a bit like Al Gore, but rather more extreme
2-feet of snow are forecast for a long band throughout the Ohio Valley over the next few days.
More Boston way on wed. Boy aren’t La Ninas fun?
henrythethird says:
January 29, 2011 at 5:33 pm
“Sounds like the newest Alarmist toy. Do the globe with 8-ball guts. That way kids can ask any question about the state of the climate, and the answer will be the same.
Of course, we have to ensure that it’s made in China…”
Alarmist toy? It could be a great novelty toy for mockery. A tiny globe, the pyramids float up to the arctic and the antarctic/lower third of the globe has big flames all around it.
I wish I knew some reputable Chinese manufacturers with an aversion to lead.
Actually I think we should market them with a few carbon credit offsets too.
The storms we have had in the Northeast this winter are Northeasters. The circulation is counter clockwise. This brings air from the North Atlantic to the coastal land areas of the North East. A look at the weather map of this type of storm will show that clearly.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/Christmas_nor%27easter_2010Dec27.jpg
A look at the temperature anomaly for Dec 2010 – Jan 2011 shows that the North Atlantic is off the coast of North America has areas of ocean which are 3degC warmer than normal.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/Christmas_nor%27easter_2010Dec27.jpg
That situation coupled with colder temperatures over land due to the position of the Arctic Oscillation have resulted in a series of heavy snow storms.
The warmer North Atlantic SST’s are a result of delayed ice formation in the Arctic Ocean and the storms were forecast in advance by Judah Cohen. His forecast turned out to be accurate.
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/putting-a-siberian-snow-connection-to-the-test/
Duke C. says:
January 29, 2011 at 3:11 pm
The NWS Coop observer forms have a box for snow depth, and the CoCoRaHS observers track snow fall, snow depth, and water content.
During the 1974 concern about the coming Ice Age, one suggestion was that all it would take is for snow to not melt some summer. That winter I flew across the US and concluded that we wouldn’t have a problem unless the conifers were completely covered.
Also, by April, the sun is so high that it will do a number on the remaining snowpack. I remember one April day in Plymouth New Hampshire, possibly in 1996, sunny, warm (about 80F – so much for the snowpack south of us keeping the air cool), and not much wind. We lost 8 inches that day. (27C, 20 cm.) I don’t know what the dew point was – dew points above freezing means air can dump a huge amount of heat on the snowpack by water vapor condensing on the snow pack.
Snowfall is an awful parameter for tracking climate, possibly even worse than Atlantic hurricanes. I track snow fall and “snow depth days” and there’s an amazing variability over the region. Depending on where the rain/snow line is for a few storms, one year can have a big difference over 40 miles, the next the data may be nearly identical. See http://wermenh.com/sdd/index.html but be kind – I didn’t log December data yet because there was so little snow until a couple days after Christmas. Also, I made a major change to switch to a frames based layout and navigation bar. I’m not sure how much is broken.
Only 8.6″ in December for me, but 36.6″ so far in January, so things are looking a lot better now. I still have space to put snow, so I’m hoping for a good (i.e. big) storm next week.
H. R. prophesises
——-
Quoting scripture (Soloman, The Wise, IIRC): “There is nothing new under the sun.”
——-
Solomon tweeting on his iPad.
Berényi Péter says:
January 29, 2011 at 3:42 pm
Mike says:
January 29, 2011 at 3:01 pm
Why this there so much water vapor in the atmosphere? What could cause that?
The real question is why the excess water vapor comes down as snow rather than rain. What could cause that?
————
No, the really real question is:
1. Why is there are lot of cold dry air coming down from the Arctic?
AND
2. A lot of moist air coming from the oceans. Moist air typically meaning relatively warmer oceans combined with wind.
The recipe for making snow includes both. I am surprised I have to explain this on a weather climate blog.
Graph from Rutgers that shows Northern Hemisphere area covered by snow.
http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/chart_seasonal.php?ui_set=nhland&ui_season=1
2009/10 was the second highest on record, since 1967. This is counter to the global warming hypothesis that says snow cover will be in a smaller area. It will be interesting to see if 2010/11 passes 2009/10 for second, or even the famous 1977/78 winter for first.
Over the last 20 years, I recall in Sydney, a number of unprecedented destructive, alarming, catastrophic climate (no weather, no climate, oh damn what is it!) events:
January 1991 – a catastrophic wind storm swept through the whole leafy North Shore. My brother-in-law’s house had three large (huge) blue gums land on his roof. His street was so badly damaged, he couldn’t get his car back home for over a week afterwards. Our swimming pool had a foot or more of chopped leaf matter in it. It looked exactly like a well kept lawn, the raised coping appeared to be completely merged horizontal with the top of the water. (Luckily, the emergency team cleaned it out eventually). We had a pile of logs, broken from overhanging trees, lining our back drive, as high or higher than our station wagon.
Some years later (can’t remember when) we were living on the north shore of Sydney Harbour with a sweeping view across to the city and the south eastern suburbs. A hail storm so big, that the green lawns turned white like snow, which lasted many hours afterwards. For up to a year afterwards, the south east was just a sea of blue tarpaulins over broken roofs, for the ferocity of the record storm.
Later still, the view across the harbour was completely blanked out, not by the usual harbour fog, but from smoke from bush fires that surrounded us almost completely. Sydney is the harbour city, for sure. It is also the forest city. We love it that way.
But the climate here is always going to extremes, has been that way for all of my many years. There is always new records made – new highs, new lows, new wets, new drys. That’s what chaotic means – long right hand tails – maths lesson anybody?
I belong to new south wales rural fire service and I agree with Ausie Dan australia have been subjected to climate changes over millions of years how do you get through to the boofheads I haven,t the answer god help us
Look at the bright side.
Fire Ants are held at bay and tend to stay more south.
Kudzu gets culled back much like it does in it’s native environment.
Africanized honey bees have to do more work to survive the cold.
Reading the above stories makes me wonder whether people are much less able to cope with weather than they used to or if the majority of the population has been so brainwashed by the CAGW meme that they are incapable of comprehending normal climate variations.
When I lived in Ottawa in the 1970’s, once the snow came down in November it stayed on the ground until April or so. There was a lot of snow and one of my jobs was to shovel the driveway, the hardest part being dealing with the 3′ high ridge of compressed snow at the base of the driveway thrown up by the overnight snowplow. Once the snow got to be over about 5′ in height next to the driveway I’d have to go up the bank and shovel the snow onto the lawn so I could deal with the next snowfall. Then I’d put on my cross country skis and ski to the university of Ottawa, quite a nice 4 mile trip on the bike paths next to the Rideau river. After a big dump of fresh snow, snowshoes were easier.
What the city of Ottawa did was to have nightly convoys of dump trucks which would be loaded with snow which was taken to one of several snow dumps which would reach impressive proportions by the end of the winter. In Calgary, IIRC, the city would melt the snow in the snow dumps by heating it and disposing of the water in the river. Ottawa had less snow than places like Quebec City where the snowbanks besides some of the highways would be 12′ or higher. I had quite an interesting experience north of Quebec City when I fell off my cross country skis into 6′ of powder snow and it was far harder than I expected to get back on my skis.
Presumably all of the same options that worked back then are available to cities today and the technology to take snow and heat it to produce water is quite straightforward. The water takes up far less room than the snow although the phase change does produce large quantities of plant fertilizer as a byproduct.
When I finally got persuaded to get my drivers license at age 25 I wondered why anyone would want to drive in the snow; it took me far longer to dig a car out of the snow and then try to find a parking spot at the university than it did to ski the equivalent distance. My cross country skis are easily at hand if I need them as are my snowshoes.
The average high temperature in January for Boston is 36F. Drive a couple hours north to Concord, NH and the average January high temperature is 30F. Many winters there is bare ground in Boston, and people hop in cars and head north to ski.
I can remember many years when we had two feet of snow on the ground in southern New Hampshire, while Boston, whose sky scrapers can be seen from our highest hills, is snow free.
It really doesn’t take much of a shift in the storm tracks to put Boston on the colder and snowier side of passing storms. The local forecasts often use the large highways that circle the city (128 and 495) as convenient demarcations for the rain-snow line.
What is unusual is to miss the “January Thaw,” which often shrinks the December and January snowpack before the February storms.
Here in southern NH it is starting to look like I’ll have to shovel snow from the roofs of my barns and sheds, which is a real bother. Who needs the extra work? All the local talk is about running out of places to put the snow.
The local road crews have enough experience of snowy winters to take steps that make room for the possibility of more snow. Front-end-loaders are even moving the larger piles away from intersections, where they block the view of oncoming traffic. However I imagine the road crews further south lack such experience. Another storm will make a real mess down there.
@LazyTeenager says:
January 29, 2011 at 8:38 pm
Berényi Péter says: January 29, 2011 at 3:42 pm
Mike says: January 29, 2011 at 3:01 pm
Why this there so much water vapor in the atmosphere? What could cause that?
The real question is why the excess water vapor comes down as snow rather than rain. What could cause that?
————
“No, the really real question is:” (blah blah blah).
No, the really really real question is why the warmist trolls want to ban CO2 instead of the much more powerful and prevelant “water vapour”?
Should be easy enough and just think of the taxpayer funded grants that will come with that one!
Where do you put it? In 95/96 Boston had piles in the streets about 20ft high but could cope, presumably because they have snow every year. New York was at a standstill and had to push their snow into the harbour. This annoyed the environmentalists.
I expect that we will get some of your snow shortly here in the UK.
The ocean temps off the US east-coast are & have been below average.
So much for the “warm ocean water causes more snow” theme — just the opposite.
I live in Kansas. I think we have set records too, and another one is coming in the next few days. See Ryan’s graphic above. I want a snowblower for Valentine’s Day.
LazyTeenager says:
January 29, 2011 at 8:38 pm
No, the really real question is:
1. Why is there are lot of cold dry air coming down from the Arctic?
AND
2. A lot of moist air coming from the oceans. Moist air typically meaning relatively warmer oceans combined with wind.
The recipe for making snow includes both. I am surprised I have to explain this on a weather climate blog.
Well, try to think of it in terms of heat, not just temperature. You need a whole lot more cold dry air mixed into moist one coming from the oceans to produce snow instead of rain. If water had no phase transition at 0°C, this mixing would have to produce water droplets at -80°C in order to extract the same amount of heat that is released to the atmosphere as latent heat at 0°C during freezing.
As that much cold dry air is coming out of the Arctic, it is obviously replaced by air masses coming from elsewhere (otherwise it would leave vacuum behind, which is not the case). These air masses being warmer than standard Arctic air hold more moisture as well. But getting into Arctic winter with no incoming solar radiation whatsoever, they’re cooling soon well below freezing, therefore even more snow (along with cold dry air) is produced, this time at higher latitudes.
Ice crystals floating in air are pretty close to perfect black body radiators in thermal IR. As effective temperature of Earth as it is seen from space is -18°C and black body radiation flux is proportional to the fourth power of absolute temperature, radiation losses go up steeply with increasing temperature. At 0°C it is about 315 W/m^2 instead of the 240 W/m^2 planetary average (that’s a 75 W/m^2 surplus, which is much, at least compared to the alleged 3.7 W/m^2 difference from CO2 doubling). This radiation escapes to space almost unimpeded from cloud tops as air above is already freeze-dried (the narrow CO2 absorption band between 14 μm and 16 μm does not have much effect there).
Cloud temperature can’t drop significantly below freezing until all the water droplets in it are turned to ice. Therefore high level of OLR (Outgoing Longwave Radiation) is maintained for some time while ASR (Absorbed Shortwave Radiation) is low due to both low incidence angle of NH winter insolation and high albedo provided by clouds and snow covered surfaces.
Therefore this high level of mixing between Arctic and mid-latitude air masses that’s observed in the last couple of years provides a strong negative feedback on net heat content of the climate system which shows up as a sharp decrease in rates of both sea level and OHC (Ocean Heat Content) rise.
As this large scale heat loss is going on, global average temperature may not drop immediately, because the Arctic is getting “hot” (while it is cooling everywhere else), provided of course -20°C (instead of the standard -40°C) can be called hot. But it only shows average temperature (as opposed to heat content) is a rather ill-formed metric. Averaging intensive quantities is never a wise move.
If one wanted to make science (instead of propaganda), it would be much better to stick to extensive quantities like heat and entropy. I am surprised I have to explain this on a weather climate blog.