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All posts for the month October, 2011

With another decade complete, the National Weather Service has updated the climate averages, which include daily high and low temperatures, and what we’re all interested in here, daily and seasonal snowfall. Because of international agreement, these averages use 30 years of data, the 3 most recently completed decades. Since the beginning of our Golden Snowball website, we have been using the averages from 1971-2000. However, soon we will be using the “new” averages, which are from 1981-2010. I’ll have to look into the “true” ending for snowfall when I get a chance as the snowfall season goes from July-June, which is different than basically every other stat. My guess is when they compute the snowfall averages, they use the snowfall for each year (1990), rather than each season (July 1990-June 1991).

I figured I’d take a look at the “old” averages and compare them with the “new” ones.

City 1971-2000 1981-2010
Albany 62.6 59.1
Binghamton 81 83.4
Buffalo 97 94.7
Rochester 100.3 99.5
Syracuse 121.1 123.8

Of the 5 GSB cities, only Binghamton and Syracuse’s averages have gone up. Syracuse is now the only city with an average of 100 or more, as Rochester falls a half an inch short at 99.5. The biggest difference between the averages is Albany’s, a decrease in 3.5 inches.

You may have noticed that I keep calling these averages, while most other people call them normals. That is because I generally try to avoid using “normal” when talking about statistics like these. To me, “normal” gives the false impression that the average is what you should expect, what “normally” happens. As any of the long time residents in the GSB cities know, the only thing normal about our winters is their abnormality.

Binghamton has started up the golden snowball contest this season.  Way to go Bingo!!!  Albany kicked the snowfall season off last year but it wasn’t until around the 8th – 9th of November last season. 

Binghamton also started this years NY snow contest off in style.  They set a date record with 1.9 inches of snow reported so far today.  Nice!

So far Albany isn’t reporting for this evening so I’m not sure what’s going on there.  I have talked to a couple of people that live around the area and earlier said some snow was coming down.  Let the CNY Snow Game Begin 🙂

Hello snow lovers and snow haters 🙂  It looks like snow is in the forecast for some of the goldensnowball cities like it or not.  I’ve always been surprised each snow season as to the city that starts off the new season receiving the first snowfall.

I’m not even sure if anyone is coming here yet but if you are lets start this new website off with a question.  Which city do you all think will get the first measurable snowfall to kick off the new 2011 – 2012 golden snowball contest?  Will it be Binghamton, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse or a couple of them?  The normal prize for the winner which is a virtual pat on the back.  Yeah, we spare no expenses here at goldensnowball.com 😉

I’m gonna say that Binghamton starts the snow party!

Have a great day and more important have a safe winter season all!

Just a heads up that it’s getting close to that time love it or hate it. I’m going to be switching over to wordpress if everything goes right and once the new design is ready it will be back to www.goldensnowball.com . Hopefully I don’t wipe the entire site and posts out from the last several years while trying to change it over.

I think we can do a little more with the site and snow contest using wordpress rather than blogger. A lot will still be the same like posting comments and so on but hopefully some extras like having you who visit being able to upload some snow pictures and a more visitor friendly site for all of us. Keeping my fingers crossed that even though I have the blogger backed up that I don’t lose everything.

Cheers,
Patrick