Surprise! Syracuse gets 10x as much snow as forecast - syracuse.com

Syracuse, N.Y. -- On Monday morning, the National Weather Service predicted Syracuse would get 0.6 inches of snow.

The final tally was 6.4 inches -- more than 10 times the forecast.

“It was quite a surprise even for us,” said Mike Kistner, a meteorologist in the weather service’s Binghamton office, which does forecasts for the Southern Tier and Central New York.

Monday turned out to be the second-snowiest March 23 on record for Syracuse, just behind the 7.8 inches that fell in 1950. One spot in Saratoga County got 9 inches, also about 6 inches more than forecast.

Where did all that snow come from?

First, Kistner notes, spring storms are notoriously difficult to predict. When it’s 20 degrees in January, you can be sure any precipitation will fall as snow. But when temperatures hover around freezing, like they did on Monday, surprises happen.

“Springtime systems are some of the toughest and trickiest. They’re the ones that give us headaches,” he said. “Is the snow going to stick? Is the sun angle strong enough to melt it on paved surfaces? It’s always a tricky beast."

The beast tricked forecasters Monday. When that heavy snow band tracked closer to Central New York than predicted, it brought along its own environment that guaranteed snow, not rain, would fall.

“When you have an intense snow band, it does what we call dynamic cooling: It cools the whole column of the air and brings it down to the surface," Kistner explained. “Temperatures were about 2 to 3 degrees cooler than what was forecast.”

That temperature difference made all the difference. Monday’s high was 38, almost exactly what was forecast, but that came before dawn. After that, temperatures dropped to freezing and stayed there; from 2 p.m. through midnight, hourly readings were an unvarying 32 degrees.

On their computer screens at the Binghamton Regional Airport, meteorologists could see from the radar that snow was falling heavier than anticipated. At 2:32 p.m., they issued a special weather statement, a short-term alert often used for quickly changing conditions like fog or thunderstorms.

Fourteen minutes later, they upped the alert to a winter weather advisory, warning of another 2 to 4 inches of wet, slippery snow for the rest of the day. Meteorologists also issued a more serious alert, a winter storm warning, for northern Oneida County, where higher elevations led to lower temperatures.

“We saw it develop and it continued to widen in scope and intensity,” Kistner said. "You saw some pretty god snowfall amounts."

The snow was heavy, too. Monday’s snowfall contained 0.88 inches of water, which made for snow-to-liquid ratio of about 7 to 1. A fluffy lake effect snowfall can have a ratio of 20 to 1 or higher.

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Surprise! Syracuse gets 10x as much snow as forecast - syracuse.com
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