GoldenSnowball.com - A Fun New York Snow Contest

I figured I would do an evening update because Binghamton has finally dug their way out from the bottom and we’ll see if it will last. Hopefully Mike and the others will come back and play now :p The latest update shows Binghamton edging their way out of last place by only a tenth of an inch. The question is can they stay out of last place for awhile???

Buffalo is really, really, REALLY skating on thin ice this season and right now they are only 2 inches away from sledding to the bottom in the GSB contest. Even if they tie Albany they are still going straight to the bottom 🙂 Only because we list them alphabetically during a tie. Well that plus it will be just a lot of fun to see Buffalo on the bottom for a change and especially this far into the snow season.

Snow is in the forecast for a good part of the week so hopefully there will be a lot more updates to come. Something could be trying to whip up for the end of the week and we’ll post more if it all comes together. Hopefully one of the experts will jump in and keep us updated. I won’t even get into my prediction I made for the SU game Sunday. It’s best just left alone. Have a super night all!

From reading around it looks like a couple of inches here and there are in the forecast for most of the Golden Snowball cities. A storm that will be coming up the coast looks like it will stay far enough to the east to miss CNY. It could get interesting though between Binghamton, Albany and Buffalo with the storm that will be moving up some time soon. Right now from what I am reading it is expected to stay to the eastern part of New York but if Albany can grab some snow from it they could skate into 3rd place.

Another scenario is if the storm can hang north east long enough to give Binghamton and Albany both a little bit of snow Buffalo could find itself in dead last. Go Bingo, Go Albany 🙂 My guess is if that happened the General would be on a plane out of Buffalo by Tuesday because of embarrassment. I don’t see it happening but it is a possibility. OK, the General will be heading out on Tuesday whether they are in last or not but the embarrassment part sounded good 🙂 Enough about weather!

Go SU basketball! I’m talking the SU women’s team who is rocking this season. Another big win last night over South Florida moves their record up to 14 – 2 and 2-1 in the Big East. Way to go ladies and keep on rocking!!! They have the game of the season coming up Tuesday night against UConn who is ranked #1 in the country right now. Start sending the vibes to the SU women’s basketball team so they can pull off the big upset of the season by beating the Huskies Tuesday night. Better yet it’s a home game so get out there and support them. I’m as guilty as the rest of Syracuse having only gone to a couple of women’s basketball games in my life but it’s better late than never to support their hard work. Unfortunately I have a prior commitment because I would rather be going to watch SU beat UConn and I can feel it’s going to happen. Who knows, maybe I will end up being able to watch the game. To Time Warner!!! START SHOWING THE WOMEN’S GAMES ON TV!!!!

It will be interesting to see if they can break the top 25 this week after last nights win over S. Florida. They had a loss to Pitt during the week but Pittsburgh was ranked 26 and SU 27 last week so hopefully the committee ranks them both in the top 25. Good Luck ladies come Tuesday night!

The men’s basketball team plays West Virgina in about half an hour and it should be a good game. Lets hope that they can turn around that loss from the other night and get a good road win today. They didn’t seem to have the running game going the last game and got beat up on the boards. If they can control the boards today and get the fast breaks going they shouldn’t have a problem. If they can’t control the boards look for a close game. Su by 18, 83 – 65 the Orange! Have a great day everyone!

Is the little girl to blame for the wacky weather? Hopefully that little burst at least gave our Fort Drum soldiers a little taste of home.

La Nina which from what I have read so far means “Little Girl” in Spanish and it seems that we are seeing the little girl cast her spells in many parts of the world. Sully who is a visitor to the Golden Snowball website has been giving us some great informative information about what could be going on right now weather wise. From what Sully says and trust me when I say I could be mis-interpreting it because it’s pretty technical stuff, is that come the end of this month it will be an official La Nina and most likely a labeled as a pretty strong La Nina or at the very least a moderate one. I’m not going to go rant on about it because I’m still a little clueless (go figure huh) and I’m still Reading up on it. From what I have read it happens because of the water temperatures get colder in the 3.4 region, I think. One thing I did read is that the waters around Australia were colder than normal which may be playing a little havoc as to what normally occurs during a La Nina. Hopefully Sully will stop by when he is feeling a little better and clear up anything I have wrong. Most likely all of it 🙂 Below are some of Sully’s responses that he posted at GSB and once again a big thanks Sully for the great information and Sully has a great informative weather blog at http://www.wunderground.com/blog/sullivanweather/ 🙂

Part of a Conversation about the Warm Weather and La Nina (Little Girl);

SULLY: To have two consecutive years of all-time record breaking warmth is quite unusual. Then again, when one has such a powerhouse Pacific storm system flooding the country with mild Pacific air on the heels of a record breaking area of high pressure (a few records for highest atmospheric pressure were broken over the southeast last week) the return flow of air between these two very large strong synoptic features will most certainly be able to tap the sub-tropics/tropics. The Pacific system’s source air also came from near 30°N, which is the top of the ‘horseshoe’ of warmer than normal SST’s that typically exists during La Nina winters. If you notice many of the all-time record highs across the Northeast for January occurred in 1950 (Strong La Nina) and 1967 (cold neutral – ONI -0.4 close to the 5 month consecutive -0.5 or lower to meet La Nina criteria as the next 3 months dipped into weak La Nina conditions -0.5,-0.6,-0.5). Those years also had major severe weather outbreaks very similar to those experienced over the previous two days.With that being said La Nina is also known for its wild temperature fluctuations and this will show itself later this month as a rather significant arctic outbreak should push its way over from Siberia. There’s already indications of this arctic air becoming displaced as there’s ridging beginning to develop, and more importantly, retrograde over eastern Asia/western Pacific. Usually when this event begins to take place arctic air is about 7-10 days away for the western hemisphere. AO/NAO variables at that time will determine how far south this arctic air will push. Current ensemble means have neutral conditions in the day 7-14 period which would have this airmass evac over the Canadian Martimes/northern New England, but this is still one to two weeks away and much can change between now and then. As it is the AO has been wildly variable for the last 6 months so I doubt a neutral AO will prevail over that entire time frame so somewhere over the northern tier of the US will get clipped by this airmass.
1/8/08 4:45 PM

Patrick said…
Sully, thanks for the great detailed explanation as to what’s going on. WeatherT from the forum also mentioned something about some pretty cold air getting ready to most likely over take the NE. Out of curiosity is the current La Nina considered weak or strong???

Sully said…
Patrick, The current La Nina is actually considered ‘moderate’. The CPC rates La Nina on the ONI index which is a measure of the nino 3.4 region anomalies averaged over a 3 month period. In order to qualify for La Nina anomalies of -0.5 or greater must be met for the 3 month averaged period for a timespan of 5 consecutive months. Technically by this definition, we have yet to attain ‘La Nina’ (this will change at the end of January which will be the 5th consecutive month these conditions will be met). The rankings are as follows:

Weak: -0.5 to -1.0
Moderate: -1.0 to -1.5
Strong: >-1.5

The latest 3 month averaged value for Oct-Nov-Dec was -1.2.—–With that being said, as far as I’m concerned we’ve reached strong La Nina conditions. The SOI has recently skyrocketed, indicating strong La Nina and the pattern over the US all winter has exhibited classic La Nina, overcoming other climatic variables.

More La Nina Information at:

http://www.enn.com/climate/article/24177

http://www.elnino.noaa.gov/lanina_new_faq.html

http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/predictions/90day/fxus05.html

http://www.ccb.ucar.edu/lanina/summary.html

Maybe not but this is about the time the snow finally started coming down last season. With all those high temperature records set the last few days for most of the Golden Snowball cities it will be interesting to see if we settle into a January pattern like last season. Take a good look at last years snow stats in the chart above because this is about the time when those numbers started going up for some of the cities. Buffalo was king of the snow hill with a decent lead mainly because of their October storm. Albany didn’t even have an inch of snow on the ground yet and Syracuse was stuck on a foot of snow for a long time.

This season December started out strong but then did an about face barely leaving enough snow on the ground to call it a white Christmas. January came in so far like December went out. Last season on the January 10th is when things started changing and it finally started snowing. Um, and snowing and snowing.

The lack of snow last season was so bad that we tried using reverse psychology, the snow dance and NYCO even threatened the Snow God http://www.silent-edge.org/wp/?p=647 to try and make snow http://goldensnowball.com/2007/01/snow-dance-reverse-psychology-or.html .

Syracuse started it’s comeback and Rochester was finally trying to make some kind of move. The General went on the most wanted list in Syracuse for building an army (literally building an army) to fend off Syracuse’s charge at the top of the hill http://goldensnowball.com/2007/01/man-wanted-in-connection-with-snow-coup.html . The big news was that finally the skiers and sledders could get their season under way because they were hurting up until right about now.

Here is how January went in 2007 and it will be interesting to see if we can have a repeat of it this snow season http://goldensnowball.com/2007_01_01_archive.html .

Have a great day all!

Well doubt any of you will be up to read this before it happens, but heads up on the line of severe storms heading across the state early this morning. Let me tell you I am as sound of a sleeper as they come and when this line blew hit it made me jolt out of bed. Can’t remember ever hearing the rain pelt the side of the house so loudly before. Hail, tons of thunder lightning, and the wind is incredible. Had to be gusts over 55 mph. I’m really suprised I can’t see more damage right now out the window.

It’s only been about 20 minutes since it happened and the power website is already showing upwards of 10,000 outages already across WNY. The police scanner is buzzing with outage and damage reports. The line is holding together pretty good and will probably be in Rochester as I publish this and maybe even hold together toward Syracuse and arrive around 6ish.

Oh and the Buffalo temp rose to 63 again this morning marking a 3rd day of record temps!