NYC vs. BOS vs. DCA Snow Climo

[Nikolai]

That and the Feb 06 storm might have both been overdone-- I didnt see anyone else coming in with 2 foot amounts, let alone the 27 inches NYC reported in Feb 06.

Am I misremembering or was there a storm (in 08-09 I think) when you were running around Central Park measuring snow and you came up with consistently higher totals than what the Park reported? I think it was your first winter up here.

That, if I'm correct, was the event before the 12/19 storm. The park most DEFINITELY had 1.5-2" and I have the g*d damned photos to prove it! This was from the 12/16 storm:

It's the only photo I could find as I've defriended both of the other above people on Facebook, but there was most definitely more than 1" in the park, which was what they reported... (and the photo above was before the storm was done!).

It all evens out though... they were good for the other events that winter and overmeasured for 3/1 (there was no way we had 8.3", definitely more like 6-7" although drifting could account for my difference in agreement..) so their overall total for 08-09 matched mine very well.

[A-L-E-X]

Fun times! Yea, I remember that now-- that was one of their infamous integer snowfalls-- 1.0 lol. I think NYC was fairly representative for the area with their 27 inch snowfall-- which is what I had also. LGA and JFK werent though.

[gymengineer]

I definitely don't feel as passionately as psuhoffman does about this particular issue, but let me make an analogy that kind of supports his (and Will's) point about how just comparing "official" sites doesn't give the full picture-- since DCA is lowest in snowfall for the immediate metro while Central Park is highest.

Say I wanted to know how windy the past blizzards, including the Boxing Day one, were for New York City. I look up Central Park stats, since it's the official reporting station, and conclude that during the time the snow was falling, the max gusts in New York City were in the mid-30mph range (the 43 mph gust came after the snow stopped). Everyone in NYC would say that was crazy, that KNYC does not represent the winds for the rest of the city, and use wind reports fromEWR, LGA and JFK to back up their assertions. With that full suite of data, you can conclude that NYC generally saw wind gusts in the 45-60 mph range at the height of the blizzard, not 36 mph.

Now, let's say I wanted to compare the winds between DC and NYC snowstorms. So, I look at DCA: 2/5-6/10 had 31s/38g max during the height of the storm while NYC only registered 23/36 during the height of the Boxing Day blizzard. So, since those are the official sites, would I be able to say that 2/5-6/10 in DC was more of an extreme blizzard than 12/26-27/10 in NYC was? Of course not, since we would all look at other reporting site data in the DC and NYC region to get a better idea of which storm was windier.