NYC's seasonal snowfall: 3rd largest on record

Except that, using your chart, the correlation does not hold up that well for the small scale variation in temperature. In other words, we’re in a high period of both temperature AND snowfall right now, historically speaking, and variations are not well correlated.
Of course, you being only 40% skeptic makes it difficult to dig into such a detail objectively, I’m sure.
Mark

A headline from today’s WSJ – part of news summaries
“Home Depot’s fiscal-fourth-quarter profit climbed 72% amid heavy demand for snow-removal gear. The also retailer boosted its dividend nearly 6%.”
HD is scattered far and wide so they are not picking up some local weather phenomena when they see snow removal equipment sales surging. It doesn’t prove anything but it says that lots of consumers spending big bucks think it will snow again. They are not sitting around wondering if their children will know what snow looks like.

I’m not very sophisticated and I’m certainly not a scientist but whenever I hear some “expert” declaring a weather event to be proof of their desire for anthropomorphic global climate disruption/warming/change, I ask “what was causing this type of weather in 1936 or 1948 or 1956” or whenever it is that I find it happening in the past. With the advent of the internet it’s simple to produce weather records to show that no matter what is going on now, it’s all happened before.
AlGore’s acolytes certainly have been shot in the foot by his “invention”.

R. Gates says:
February 22, 2011 at 11:36 am
Thanks for the weather update. Historically (over thousands of years, and based on ice core data) the warmer periods have seen the highest snowfall accumulations.
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I imagine that not even you would claim that what causes evaporation in a given region at a given time is the global temperature averaged over latitude, season and diurnal variation. You would probably hesitate to attribute the coolness that produces snow rather than rain to that same average. But you happily imply that the two together are the product of an average global teperature.

RGates:
Thanks for the weather update. Historically (over thousands of years, and based on ice core data) the warmer periods have seen the highest snowfall accumulations.
See: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/alley2000/alley2000.gif
For the very basic truth of this.
Just sayin’…
——————-
Sorry old boy. I don’t trust those “reconstructions”. For one thing, the O18 to 016 proxy, is just trash as far as I’m concerned. (And YES, I have the background!)
I found like 3 papers correlating Snowfall with “average” temperature…in the Northern Hemisphere. Trend was always consistent. Colder winter, more snowfall (based on “average” temperature for the season.)
I think what you and the AWG apologists are missing is that, yes, when it is VERY cold, the snow is less (air can’t hold the water), when we talk about the “average” seasonal temperature…over the span of a season, if it drops EARLIER to the snowfall capable range, it starts SNOWING earlier. And likewise, continues LONGER on the far end of the season.
Most interesting is my histogram analysis of MN temperatures, (based on a local meteorologist’s reconstruction using data going back to 1820, from Fort Snelling, Mpls, MN) shows the fact there there almost always is a “seasonal drop” over a period of a week to 10 days, and a commensurate “jump” on the spring side.
Then in the WINDOW between, it snows. Sure, in our area there are 1, 2 or 3 weeks with multi degree F below zero, but this is a small part of the season, and effects overall snowfall consistently and with little regard for the “average temperature effect”.
Thus the old phrase, “It was a cold AND snowy winter!”.
Max

for the basic truth of this….
…..Jan 2011, -0.01 deg. C
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_Jan_2011.gif

Interesting that none of those record snowfalls occured in the 1970s when we were on the verge of descending into an ice age.

@RGates
Interesting how that shows temperature has been dropping steadily but slowly since 10k years ago. Makes you wonder what caused the enormous, sudden spike though of around 10C, eh?

The Central Park seasonal chart isn’t clear. Does it include any Feb. ’11 data? IAC, another 16″ puts the total over the top, all-time.
If the “season” includes March, should be a slam dunk!

Off the top of my head I would have thought the spread in snowfall between Central Park and Minneapolis would have been much more dramatic. Without looking at the records I would probably have guessed close to double. You learn something new every day.

R. Gates,
I think you failed to notice that the temperature scale is inverted at
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/alley2000/alley2000.gif
Snowfall is increasing with decreasing temperature

Snowfall is increasing with decreasing temperatures….
….but is over all precipitation/water increasing
no
Which is the total opposite of what they said about warmer air and more moisture.
Bottom line, it’s cold.
If it wasn’t cold, it would rain.
…and rainfall is down

R. Gates wrote: “Historically (over thousands of years, and based on ice core data) the warmer periods have seen the highest snowfall accumulations.”
Wow! I can’t imagine how unbearably hot it must have been during the last Ice Age!!!
How ever did the polar bears survive???

R. Gates says:
February 22, 2011 at 11:36 am
Thanks for the weather update. Historically (over thousands of years, and based on ice core data) the warmer periods have seen the highest snowfall accumulations.
See: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/alley2000/alley2000.gif
For the very basic truth of this.
Just sayin’…
____________________________________________________________
So you are taking the evidence from one location, at the heart of the Greenland Ice Sheet, as demonstrating that snowfall decreases with temperature over the entire Northern Hemisphere?
Wow. Just wow.
Geological reconstructions indicate that during the peak of the last glaciation, the Northern USA was covered with ice 1-2 miles thick, but that the climate in the Southern USA was not very different from what we experience today.
Stop and think for a moment what effect such a strong latitudinal temperature gradient, over relatively short distances may have had on snowfall rates. The last 2 winters give a pretty good indication of what happens when Arctic air masses clash with Sub-tropical air masses.
Multiply this effect by 10, or maybe 100, and you may start to get a handle on the sort of conditions likely to have prevailed over the USA during the last glaciation.
All that ice didn’t get there by itself.

R. Gates says:
February 22, 2011 at 3:04 pm
“Neither did the large chunk of ice that sits atop the coldest one of the driest places on earth…Antarctica. Essentially, Antarctica is still in a glacial period and is exactly the kind of conditions the N. Hemisphere saw during the last glacial advance (the Younger Dryas period)…cold and dry with whatever snow that falls not melting and slowly building up into large thick glacial masses.”
_____________________________________________________________
Antarctica is a completely different kettle of fish from North America.
It has been in a glacial age ever since it became separated from South America 15 million years ago, at which point the establishment of the Southern Circumpolar Current effectively separated it, climatically, from the rest of the planet.
The Younger Dryas advance (since you quoted it) took place over a mere thousand years. Having studied it in some depth at University, there is little doubt in my mind that it was fuelled by similar levels of precipitation to those observed today, but the colder conditions meant that a much greater proportion of that precipitation fell as snow, rather than rain.
The same principal IMO, only on a larger scale, can also be applied to the formation of the Laurentide and Fenno-Scandanavian ice sheets following the last inter-glacial c.110k years ago.
Your perception of ice ages as bitterly cold, essentially dry periods where ice never melts simply doesn’t work for me. I see them as much more dynamic events where ice sheet accumulation occurred because winter snowfall occurred on a grand enough scale to exceed the considerable ice melt which would have taken place at the edges of the ice sheets during the summers.

Anything is possible says:
February 22, 2011 at 4:02 pm
R. Gates says:
February 22, 2011 at 3:04 pm
“Neither did the large chunk of ice that sits atop the coldest one of the driest places on earth…Antarctica. Essentially, Antarctica is still in a glacial period and is exactly the kind of conditions the N. Hemisphere saw during the last glacial advance (the Younger Dryas period)…cold and dry with whatever snow that falls not melting and slowly building up into large thick glacial masses.”
_____________________________________________________________
Antarctica is a completely different kettle of fish from North America.
It has been in a glacial age ever since it became separated from South America 15 million years ago, at which point the establishment of the Southern Circumpolar Current effectively separated it, climatically, from the rest of the planet.
The Younger Dryas advance (since you quoted it) took place over a mere thousand years. Having studied it in some depth at University, there is little doubt in my mind that it was fuelled by similar levels of precipitation to those observed today, but the colder conditions meant that a much greater proportion of that precipitation fell as snow, rather than rain.
The same principal IMO, only on a larger scale, can also be applied to the formation of the Laurentide and Fenno-Scandanavian ice sheets following the last inter-glacial c.110k years ago.
Your perception of ice ages as bitterly cold, essentially dry periods where ice never melts simply doesn’t work for me. I see them as much more dynamic events where ice sheet accumulation occurred because winter snowfall occurred on a grand enough scale to exceed the considerable ice melt which would have taken place at the edges of the ice sheets during the summers.
____
Yes, I do see the glacial periods as cold and dry (when compared to interglacials) but I never used the term “bitterly”. In general though, the parts of the N. Hemisphere covered with ice were certainly more like Antarctica then something warmer and wetter.
I actually only originally made the simple comment that over thousands of years, in and out of glacial periods, ice cores records show that we see generally the snowfall ACCUMULATION rates drop when it is colder and rise when it is warmer, and that the reasons for this are based on simple physics. More generally, I also think we would benefit by discussing N. Hemisphere winter vs. late spring snowcover extent if we want to look at climate changes, as it will more indicative of a changing climate to see growth or decline in late spring/early summer snowcover extents, as this would indicate of the snow is starting to stick around later in the season. As has been the case for many decades now, we’ve seen a decline in N. Hemisphere late spring/early summer snowfall extents. (note: this is a completely separate issue from accumulation!) See:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/snowcover-nhland/201005.gif
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global-snow/2010/6
When the next glacial period comes again, (assuming there are humans around to record such an event) you’d see both the above graphs begin to reverse, as the May and June N. Hemisphere snowcover would begin to increase as less melting would occur with cooler temps.

The best indicator for judging the fierceness of any given season is to sample reaction to the appearance of any change to said season. Today in my home state the people were marveling and applauding the beautiful weather. It was in the fifties with a brilliant blue sky and bright burning sun. We are all so wanting the arrival of spring and the change to a more temperate clime, it’s proof positive of the extremity of this winter’s weather. I’m all about this coming change. Winter proved its virility and no one wishes to assail it any longer. Forward spring! Heck, let us pass spring by and go directly to summer! Please excuse me now… I have to hunt down my slippers… sigh…

“John Kehr says:
February 22, 2011 at 2:17 pm
…all Jones has to do is flip some of those -30C days into +30C days and the average anomaly will show up as normal.” January 2011 seems about right.
See the most recent Hadcrut3 data at http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadcrut3gl.txt
The January anomaly was 0.194. Of the last 23 years, 18 were warmer and 5 were colder.

Gary says: at 5:56 pm
Today in my home state the people were marveling and applauding the beautiful weather.
I currently live in Washington State east of the Cascades – 100+ miles south of the lake used in the study mentioned in another post, that is, Castor Lake. The NWS expects our area to have temperatures of 8, 4, and 7 F. for Thur., Fri., and Saturday evenings this week.
We are marveling also; applauding – not so much.

R. Gates says:
February 22, 2011 at 11:36 am
Thanks for the weather update. Historically (over thousands of years, and based on ice core data) the warmer periods have seen the highest snowfall accumulations.

I do hope there is no implication of man in your flattening temperature graph? Now lets see the “the very basic truth of this.”

“The CSI Team’s analysis indicates that’s not likely. They found no evidence — no human “fingerprints” — to implicate our involvement in the snowstorms. If global warming was the culprit, the team would have expected to find a gradual increase in heavy snowstorms in the mid-Atlantic region as temperatures rose during the past century. But historical analysis revealed no such increase in snowfall. Nor did the CSI team find any indication of an upward trend in winter precipitation along the eastern seaboard.”

Just reporting. After two 70F (21C) days last week, snow returned to western MD. Nothing unusual, but the 4.5 inches of snow/sleet had a remarkably high water content of 1.01 inches (~26mm). That’s some pretty dense frozen precip — like shoveling concrete.
It was needed here, the ground surface until last week was frozen all winter & all the previous snow that recently melted had run off and not soaked into the ground.

Modz: typo (with an unfortunate history!): El Nino, not La Nino. ;0
pls fix!
I blame a coffee-fueled all-nighter climate surfing.