PULASKI -- Although it may seem hard to believe, the intense band of lake effect squalls that hit parts of Oswego County Wednesday night into early Thursday was the first major lake snow event of the season for some parts of the area.
Pulaski, one of the well known “hot spots” (as it were) for heavy duty lake snows picked up nearly two feet of snow in just under 10 hours, which is pretty impressive. Another impressive snow report was Redfield with 28”, and the City of Oswego had a foot. The winner appears to be Altmar which came in with 30 inches.
One of the trickiest things in the weather forecasting business is trying to nail down where a band of lake effect snow will be located and how intense will it be, and certainly this band of squalls was no different. I am happy to report though that our predictions of the band of snow staying well north of downtown Syracuse and even north of Route 31 worked out quite well.
Yes, we were a little worried Wednesday night into Thursday morning when we noticed other forecasters in Syracuse had the lake snows moving into the city, and the possibility of several inches at that. The National Weather Service issued a Lake Effect Snow Advisory for Onondaga County. Despite this, we stuck to our guns and continued our prediction of the snow band remaining well north of downtown, generally in Oswego County... and it did.
I wanted to mention this because what happened with the forecasting of this lake snow band, and the rather dramatic difference in forecasts between meteorologists, all of us located in the same city, is a prime example of a question I get asked at least once a week. People ask “How come your forecast is different than across town” or something like this. Great question. The answer is simply this. We all start with the same information, but how we analyze all this information varies from person to person along with each meteorologist having varying amounts of experience under their belts.
Looking ahead, for those of us (me included) in search of some type of belated January thaw, good news! We might in fact see a nice little moderation in temperatures the middle and the end of next week. Hooray!
