What caused the lack of snow in the '50's & '60's

[xsledder]

Thank you for posting the climatology on your site. Briefly looking at it I noticed 13 years in the '50's and '60's saw snow totals less then 200 inches. The rest of the years he snow totals where in the low to mid 200 inches. There where no years where the snow totals exceeded 300 inches.

Now, for the past two decades (2000 and up) there are 3 years with snow totals over 300 inches, 2 years with snow totals under 200 inches, and the remaining 13 years the snow totals where between 200 and 300 inches.

Am I reading the climatology wrong? Do you have the climatology upside down? Did you transpose the numbers creating the climatology?

I guess my real question is why is there more snow in the last two decades then in the '50's and '60's? What's going on? Aren't things are warming up so there should be less snow? I keep hearing from everyone it doesn't snow like it use to. According to your climatology list, they are right, it is snowing more.

Thank you, that's all.

 

[jd]

It's hard to say what caused this. It could be as simple as how or even where they were measuring the snow. There has not, or even still is not, a lot of consistency in how snow is measured. There are guidelines that the NWS uses, but many of the guidelines leaves the door open to human interpretation. It could also be just the way things happened in that time frame. Looking back at any weather/climate variable there are fluctuations and this could have been just a down period for snow.

My personal opinion is that about 70% of it has to do with some kind of difference in measuring and the other 30% with what actually happened.

-John

 

[G]

I will agree with John. If you wait even a day to measure LES snow it will have settled. Who knows the methods they used back in the 50's? The people that actually did the measuring are probably all taking dirt naps now so you cant ask them. If you stomp down a foot of LES you get about 1/2 inch. It is full of air. Lots of room for measuring errors.