Monday night/Tuesday morning’s lake effect ended up weaker than we initially thought so we added very little to our monthly snow total over the last 24 hours. We didn’t get the connection from Georgian Bay like we were thinking and that made all the difference. It looks like we will not have the snowiest month on record and we are just .1” behind February 1958 for the second snowiest month.
With things quieting down I thought I would take a look at winter snowfalls so far across New York state. It isn’t earth-shattering information but I found it kind of interesting. Our friends at
Golden Snowball Award do a good job of tracking the totals at the major upstate cities through the winter season and they declare the city with the most snow the ‘winner.’. At times they even turn it in to a good natured competition (for the record, Syracuse has won the award 8 straight winters now). Here’s where the cities stand as of Tuesday:
| Syracuse | 73.3” |
| Rochester | 46.9” |
| Buffalo | 33.6” |
| Binghamton | 33.3” |
Is there a chance that cities like Buffalo or Rochester could catch us? I looked back over the last 20 winters to find out which city was ahead in the contest as of New Years Eve then which city ultimately had the most snow at the end of winter. Here is what I found. 12 out of the last 20 years the city in the lead on December 31
st ended up with the most snow by spring.
Syracuse’s record with the ‘lead’ is even better. Eleven times over those 20 years Syracuse held the lead at the end of December and only once did Syracuse
not end up with the Golden Snowball Award at the end of the winter season. That one winter was 1998-99 and it took two rare back to back major snowstorms (22.3” and 18.4”) that only hit Rochester that March to do the trick.
So Syracuse has a two foot lead on its competition at this point and no city in the last 20 years has overcome that kind of a lead after the first of the year to take the crown of Golden Snowball Award. So for Rochester or any other city to take crown away from Syracuse it is going to take something unusual or extreme to happen the last half of winter.
