Buffalo Snow

:date: 2022-11-23 19:07 :tags:

Last week we were spending time in Xenia, OH, an unlikely confluence of superb world class bike trails. Some days into our trip we saw that snow was expected back home in Buffalo. We planned to return at the weekend but it soon became clear that was not going to work out.

Pretty quickly Buffalo jumped to the top of weather news sensational headlines as a lake effect snow storm settled on the area. Astonishing totals were reported, as high as 77 inches in 48 hours.

Here's CNN's report. Here are a lot of photos.

Here's the house of someone I heard from personally in West Seneca.

Clearly some people were having a tough time. Including us.

We were blocked from returning home because all the roads from the south leading to Buffalo were closed. Very annoyed to be missing skiing snow, I did some creative trip planning and drove to Roscommon, MI, home of the best Nordic skiing shop IMO. They were also having lake effect snow but it was manageable. This allowed me to buy some more skis (two pairs) and enjoy skiing on some very nice trails.

Here I'm skiing their excellent trail network. (Can't say I'm chuffed about needing to wear orange in order to not get shot, but at least it's already a big part of my sartorial aesthetic because of other people who want to kill me.)

Here is an unusual shot of me on the live XCSkiHQ Trail Cam (staring at a telephone like a perfectly normal person  —  bonus points if you can deduce the essence of the text I was sending). This shows how much early season snow central Michigan was also getting (from a different Lake's lake effect).

We stayed the weekend in MI hoping the weather would calm down a bit and then cunningly sneaked home through Canada, a full circumnavigation of Lake Erie.

Since my mail is addressed to "Buffalo, NY" people who knew me wondered if my house had collapsed or something like that. No. Astonishingly, my neighborhood got annoyingly little snow. I say "annoyingly" because people who like skiing would be delighted to see snow thoroughly covering everything. What is a malicious weather god to do when I've thwarted its plan to use snow to block my return home by showing up from the other direction with new skis? Do not underestimate the malevolent weather gods!

It turns out that what is more interesting than the prodigious snow totals that were reported in the news is the even more astonishing variance.

Take a look at this weather.gov table which I believe is the Erie County (New York) 48-hour snow totals as of November 19.

While some areas did get some serious snow, my neighborhood (Amherst) got almost none. Here is what we came home to.

And 6 minutes after that photo I had completely cleared the driveway and taken a pee. I felt almost silly using my (Made In California) Manplow; I can't imagine the brutal humiliation my neighbors must have felt using their gas powered snow blowers on such a paltry amount.

After seeing such severe reports on the news, it was kind of weird to come home to basically the amount of snow I would not have found amiss in Xenia (there was some on the ground there when we arrived). I took a closer look at that table and plotted this map to show it better. The bigger the circles, the more snow as reported in the table.

The circle at the very bottom is Hamburg with 73.7 inches. To the northeast of that is Orchard Park in first place with 77.0 inches. As you can see the heavy dumpings were really in the south and, importantly to me, not in the north. Another way to think about it is that the 29k seat University of Buffalo Stadium in Amherst and the 73k seat Highmark Stadium in Orchard Park (where the Bills play) are separated by less than 16 miles, yet in the time period recorded one got six feet of snow more than the other. They moved the Bills game to Detroit; would it have made more sense to move it just down the road? Do people think Buffalo is a wintry place because most of what they see of it are NFL games from a stadium located in the most extreme focus of lake effect snow?

I did manage to barely ski on the scant snow that was in my neighborhood (tore a big hole in my new skis too). Here's me in my backyard yesterday morning on some pretty tenuous snow.

This morning, we went down to see if going south a bit could find some of that much talked about snow. The map shows a marker in Cheektowaga at the Reinstein Nature Preserve. Sure enough there was a decent amount of snow there.

As shown on the map, from nearly nothing on the trails behind my house to at least 18" less than 10 miles away!

I guess if I actually had perfect information I could always go to where the snow was good, sort of like picking the right elevation to get the desired temperature (though note it is completely flat everywhere near me with only one famous exception just off the edge of that map). But since I don't know what the micro-climate is in each neighborhood, it is kind of difficult to balance "too snowy to drive there" and "not enough snow to ski".

I suppose I should be grateful for any kind of snow in these modern times but it seems like the worst of all possibilities to have to suffer the negative effects of a lot of snow but not really get enough snow to do things that require snow! I really would like to live somewhere that has more reliably serious snowfall patterns. But for now, I'll take what I get and enjoy early season skiing when and where I can.