Northeastern U.S. Weather

It's been a much leaner snow year in the rest of the Northeast. Jay Peak and Stowe are reporting over 350" of snow so far this season but Stratton in southern VT is reporting 150" of total snowfall and Hunter Mountain in the Catskills is reporting only 53" of snow this season. I'm in the Berkshires about an hour east of Hunter and I don't think we have even had 25" of snow all Winter.
I would call the Adk above average, to very good.

Gore is at 80% of total average snowfall at this point.

The lack of a real synoptic storm is notable, and a bummer IMO.
 
I do not think snowfall is the right metric to measure the NE season's success. It's all about 0C/32F and no rain. How many days/weeks?

We don't measure that in snow reporting.

Honestly, I went to Dartmouth because I thought it was the best college in snow country. But the snow sucked when I was there in the 1990s - one good year out of four.
 
I do not think snowfall is the right metric to measure the NE season's success. It's all about 0C/32F and no rain. How many days/weeks?

We don't measure that in snow reporting.
I make a point to track both for the purpose of maintaining this web page. The key metric is percent of terrain open, and Northeast terrain does close after rain/freeze events. There is also an OpenSnow page for New England which most definitely discusses whether precipitation events are rain or snow. I look at those for every weekend. For 9 weeks Northern Vermont has had over a foot of snow every week, the last widespread rain event before the one happening now was Dec. 29-31, and the four areas I post (Jay, Stowe, Sugarbush and Killington) have all been at least 85% open continuously since early January. The Mansfield Stake has a 102 inch base.
Unfortunately, I think it has been too cold and windy some days to have an enjoyable time skiing.
That I do not track unless it's bad enough to close lifts/terrain.

JSpin's blog is another useful resource, but it's not up to date at the moment.
 
IMO odds are decent that Gore will exceed their seasonal avg. Gore was way well behind the other two at the beginning of January.

Also Whiteface and Gore don't use the same methodology for measuring snow. Whiteface includes the summit total in the seasonal average. Gore 'generally' reports from the base, except that this year, they have, at times used the summit number.

Gore is not consistent about it. Now it seems they use the summit number if the base was zero.
 
I do not think snowfall is the right metric to measure the NE season's success. It's all about 0C/32F and no rain. How many days/weeks?
Don't agree with this 100%, snowfall matters, but there is a lot of truth to this.

I really watch Gore. It's not a great proxy for NY, but a decent one. In 14/15, we recorded 115 inches, a bit below average but the season included 6 weeks without rain, and it was generally agreed to be an excellent season. This year's cold was more sustained, 8 weeks long (and much colder) and we are ahead of 14/15 in snowfall to date, by about 10%. Some of this year's cold pushed the storms south too. That didn't happen in 14/15.

 
Back
Top