"WE HAVE 60" OF FAKE LAKE EFFECT FLUFF"

Written by: Brian Neudorff

The title of this post comes from a comment left yesterday in Scott's post, "BEATING A DEAD HORSE" on how yet another storm system will miss Western New York. This comment struck a chord with me and I think it really sums up the frustration felt by many of you who love the snow and winter weather.

Here are the facts, as I know them. Here in Rochester we have seen 62.2" of snow for the season. At least 90% of that is from lake effect. It's tough to quantify just how much of our current snowfall has come from synoptic but it's safe to say that less than 10 inches of our 62.2" is from snow outside of lake effect. When you consider that 50% to maybe 55% of our snow (on average) comes from lake effect with the other 45% to 50% coming from snow storms, to be above normal for the season and getting only 10% from synoptic that is impressive, but not the scenario many of you want to see.

This morning, I talked with one of the Buffalo National Weather Service Meteorologist Steve Mclaughlin, he provided me with some of the data above. Since I've only been here for 2 winters, I also wanted to get a better climatological understanding of where all of our snow comes from and see if I could pick their brains a little to see when we might start to see a change in the pattern and get a good storm up here in Western New York.

This brings me to another comment left by another frustrated visitor to our blog who said this, "are there ANY scraps for us to hold on to at this point that give us hope that a big one is still coming....based on data?" Unfortunately, the best data we have at this point is climatology, and historically speaking, our best chance to get a big synoptic storm is from late February into early March. If you are looking for any big storms for the next two weeks it still doesn't look like it is in our favor. In fact, there are some forecasts that I have seen that push the southern jet even a little farther south and some of these storms just pass through the southeastern US and out to see.

We all feel your frustration here in the weather office. We want to have our turn at a big snow storm, but we need realize how fortunate we are that we have any snow at all, and to be above normal for the season at this point.

The saying goes "misery loves company" and if you go and check out AccuWeather.com's Jesse Farrell's Weather Matrix blog he did a post on other northeastern locations that are fairing worst than we are when it comes to their seasonal snow amounts.