icebreaker5221 Posted September 15, 2011 Share Posted September 15, 2011 I'm not sure how many of you know about the Regional Snowfall Impact Scale (RESIS), a joint effort between NOAA/NESDIS/NCDC, but the idea is to develop a standardized scale region-specific for categorizing and ranking the relative severity of winter storms from a framework similar to NESIS but applicable to (eventually) the entire country. It is available online here: http://gis.ncdc.noaa....map?view=resis I toyed around with this product for a while, and decided that it would be nice to see a list of the top 10 storms by region. So I clicked on the AMS abstract (http://gis.ncdc.noaa...e_27th_IIPS.pdf), and lo-and-behold a list of the top 50 storms for each region already exists! I'll only show the top 10 for west north central: I was very excited, and decided to see a few of these for myself. I looked at the west north central region just to try it out, as it was somewhere not already included in NESIS, and then decided to see the top few storms plotted on the map. However, when I actually pulled up the #1 storm in Apr 1919 (with a RESIS rating of 25.023 and a category of 5) the plot denotes rating and category in each region, only to give a 6.3 and cat 3. Snow totals are impressive, but I suspected not #1 worthy. When I pull up the #2 storm, with an index of 20.891 in the abstract, the map depicts a much more impressive looking storm than the supposed #1, with an index of 27.58. So is the abstract wrong or is the website wrong? This website also has an option to view monthly and yearly/seasonal snowfall totals and percentages relative to normal, which is a very useful tool. Unfortunately, each year has quite a few missing stations incorrectly labeled as having 0 accumulation. There is a button to turn off stations reporting 0, but I would like to be able to see the true 0 accumulations in the south without seeing the false 0's in MI and CO (or wherever). Another tricky thing is if you want to see seasonal snowfall, you have to select the year in which the season ended, not began! (select 2010 to see 09-10). This is not indicated anywhere I could find, but I figured it out. Once you make it past the above 2 issues, it is a great tool. It's very easy to see the difference between epic years like 09-10 and miserable years like 90-91: I could see this site becoming quite popular amongst the analogues crowd, historical data buffs, and weather weenies alike! I would really like to see seasonal and/or storm maps with contours and shading rather than the station point system. Of course this opens up the need for “guess work” between data points, but it is certainly more aesthetically pleasing to look at. Anyways, I may have sounded a bit critical and harsh at times, but I nonetheless commend NCDC for their effort. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
icebreaker5221 Posted September 16, 2011 Author Share Posted September 16, 2011 Nobody? So let me ask, does anyone have a better link for historical snow maps? Anyone post homemade maps on their own website perhaps? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mallow Posted September 16, 2011 Share Posted September 16, 2011 I might care more if they didn't completely ignore the west. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
QVectorman Posted September 16, 2011 Share Posted September 16, 2011 Looks like a great site! It would be a nice addition besides the plot of data points if it offered an interpolated and smoothed contour map. IMHO. Still I think I was dreaming of something like this last year and could never find it. Will there be something like this for current storms this winter? So you don't have to jump from WFO to WFO looking for storm totals in each region. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MN Transplant Posted September 16, 2011 Share Posted September 16, 2011 Very interesting. I can't for the life of me figure out how some of those 50 East North Central snowstorms got in ahead of the '91 Halloween Blizzard that gave the Minneapolis metro area nearly 30". Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
icebreaker5221 Posted September 16, 2011 Author Share Posted September 16, 2011 I might care more if they didn't completely ignore the west. I believe I read somewhere that they plan on expanding it to include the west at some point. Not sure if and when it will ever happen, but I'll be sure to update this thread if it does! Looks like a great site! It would be a nice addition besides the plot of data points if it offered an interpolated and smoothed contour map. IMHO. Still I think I was dreaming of something like this last year and could never find it. Will there be something like this for current storms this winter? So you don't have to jump from WFO to WFO looking for storm totals in each region. They are planning to update after each storm once all the totals are in. Not sure what the lag will be tho. Very interesting. I can't for the life of me figure out how some of those 50 East North Central snowstorms got in ahead of the '91 Halloween Blizzard that gave the Minneapolis metro area nearly 30". Yeah, that is hard to believe. I'm willing to bet that it was never included or just overlooked for some reason. If it were included, I'm sure it would score higher than many of the weaker storms. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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