The neat thing about that storm was the fact that it was just a solid cold powder event with minimal temp issues. It really illustrated how strong the blocking was setting up that winter. Ironically, I was at a geography conference in New Paltz, NY in October 2009 and there was a grad student at SUNY who was researching NAO spatial relationships with the upcoming winter. They had forecast that a NAO which went negative during the summer, and was focused near a certain lat/lon had a statistically significant correlation to above average snowfall but not necessarily temperature in the northeast US. they had gone out on a limb and said the summer of 2009 NAO matched up with a forecast of above average snowfall for the upcoming winter. I've been trying to find the conference proceedings from that event to see if I could get the presentation or locate the authors, but alas I've come up empty.