FOCUS: SNOWFALL
Season's snow has belted Southern Tier, spared city
Lake-effect snow bands have dumped nine feet of snow on South Dayton
Take someone the size of basketball star Yao Ming — at 7-foot-6 — stand him up on a hilltop in South Dayton or Mayville, and he would have been buried by the lake-effect snow that already has belted parts of the Southern Tier this fall.
In the City of Buffalo, the snowfall wouldn’t reach a toddler’s waist.
Buffalo residents have watched and listened to a litany of lake-effect snow warnings, watches and advisories in late November and early December, only to look outside and find barely a trace of snow on their lawns and driveways.
At the extremes, South Dayton, in Cattaraugus County, has been hit with close to 110 inches so far this fall, according to the National Weather Service’s snow spotters. That’s about 9 feet of snow.
The National Weather Service office in Cheektowaga has had 13.8 inches of snow this season, while most of the city has had 8 to 10 inches and the immediate suburbs 10 to 14 inches.
South Dayton residents seem to be taking in stride that they’ve become the dumping ground for the highest pile of snow.
“It’s Western New York, and we happen to live on the edge of lake-effect snow bands,” Village Clerk Paula Stockman said. “I’m not one to complain about the weather.
“Live with it.”
In November alone, the disparity was even greater, with South Dayton getting 84 inches, Mayville 73 inches, Ellicottville 70 inches and the metro Buffalo area anywhere from 2 to 8 inches.
“In 15 years with these snow spotters, this is the first time I’ve seen this kind of discrepancy in November,” National Weather Service meteorologist Steve McLaughlin said Thursday.
The culprit — or hero — here is a remarkably consistent northwest wind. It’s as if someone turned on a large industrial- type fan, aimed in one direction.
Which area gets hit hardest by lake-effect snow depends on the wind direction. With lake-effect snow, the wind picks up the warm, moist air over an open lake and dumps it back on the colder land.
So a northwest wind carries Lake Erie’s lake-effect snow well south of the City of Buffalo.
Early in the winter, McLaughlin explained, the winds coming off the lake usually are more from the west and southwest. That’s because the arctic air heading down from Canada goes around the warmer lakes, developing into a more southwest wind.
This year has been far different.
“We just have a very extreme cold mass that came at us directly from the northwest,” McLaughlin explained. “It’s always been northwest, which has saved Buffalo and buried parts of the Southern Tier.”
Some residents of Buffalo and its immediate suburbs have had a tough time believing how hard hit other areas have been.
“I took pictures of the snow I had at home and brought them into work, because I knew they wouldn’t believe it unless they saw it,” said Bertha Steckmeyer, a senior stenographer for the Buffalo Board of Education who lives in Freedom, in northeastern Cattaraugus County.
For the last week or two, Steckmeyer has been wearing knee-high boots.
“When you get to Buffalo, you don’t need any boots,” she said.
National Weather Service officials point out that it’s not the whole Southern Tier that has been under a snowbank.
Dunkirk, in Chautauqua County, recorded only 15 inches of snow in November, and Olean, in Cattaraugus County, got 16 inches. Those totals are about one-fifth of the heaviest snowfalls in each of those counties.
“My daughter says all you have to do is get out of South Dayton,” Stockman said. “It’s only snowing over the top of our house.”
McLaughlin explained why a northwest wind dumps its greatest lake-effect totals on the area described as the Chautauqua Ridge, which runs parallel to the eastern edge of the lake, about 5 to 10 miles inland, mostly in northern Chautauqua and northwestern Cattaraugus counties. That ridge runs roughly 1,000 feet above the lake.
The cold air flows over the lake and runs into these hills, which slow the air and force it to rise, unleashing the precipitation at the higher elevation and creating larger snowfalls, he said.
Meanwhile, a straight west wind tends to batter southern Erie County, Wyoming County and northern Chautauqua and Cattaraugus counties.
Based on the shape of the eastern end of Lake Erie, which runs largely southwest to northeast, a southwest wind travels across 200 miles of open lake water, with the Buffalo metro area in its sights.
“You get those long narrow bands that clobber Buffalo,” McLaughlin said.
That type of southwest wind is responsible for some of the Buffalo metro area’s greatest lake-effect storms, including the October Surprise in 2006, along with storms in December 2001 and November 2000.
The last four weeks have been unusually cold in Buffalo, with the temperatures generally about six degrees below normal. So the Lake Erie temperature is 37 degrees, compared with a normal average of about 41 degrees at this time of year.
That suggests an early freezing of the lake, which would mean an earlier end to the lake-effect snows that hit us. But some warmer temperatures in the next few weeks are expected to keep the Lake Erie temperature about where it is.
How about the chances of a white Christmas?
A white Christmas is defined as having at least 1 inch of snow on the ground at 7 a. m. Dec. 25. That’s happened 58 percent of the time dating back to 1943, but there has been a white Christmas nine of the last 10 years.
“Right now, it looks like exactly 50-50,” McLaughlin said.
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