
Was 2015 Boston's worst winter yet? - brk
http://web.mit.edu/bletham/www/winter2015.html
======
sfeng
The post ends with: "It actually was a once-in-a-century winter, which is good
news for Boston, because it means we probably won't see another winter like
this in our lifetime."

This may or may not be true, depending on how much climate change affects our
environment during our lifetime.

~~~
ChuckMcM
So very true, in the next glacial period Boston will, no doubt, continuously
be under snow and ice.

I find the national media's enthusiasm for making weather (not climate change,
just weather) "news" rather sad.

~~~
at-fates-hands
We have a local sports talk personality who likes to call them "weather
terrorists" and makes fun of all the dire forecasts.

Like the Monday we were supposed to get a foot of snow overnight that would
cripple the city, make your commute hell and warned to stay inside and not
venture outside unless you absolutely had to. Not only did we only get an
inch, the temp came up to a balmy 35, the sun came out and by 1pm, the new
snow had already totally melted.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I like that, weather terrorists! It is shorter than radical extremist
meteorologists (a play on radical extremist theologians)

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esw
Snowfall aside, I think most New Englanders will still relate to 1978 as a
more severe winter given the number of fatalities.

~~~
ghaff
The Blizzard of 78 caught people almost totally by surprise. It also had some
of the same snow accumulation from multiple storms issue that this year had.

For years, just about everyone at least knew a friend of a friend who got
stuck on Route 128 and had to be evacuated or got stuck at their office for
multiple days. As a result, people in the Boston area were really paranoid
about heading home if there was a storm coming. Some I know said to me once
that they had never seen any northern city where people were so anxious to get
going when it started snowing.

(I was in Cambridge in 78 but at school with no car so it was pretty much just
a memorable and fun experience.)

~~~
virtualwhys
> I was in Cambridge in 78 but at school with no car so it was pretty much
> just a memorable and fun experience

All I remember were the igloos everywhere in the streets of Cambridge(port),
lit by candles it was a wonderland...one of my earliest memories.

Have been away for a long time, but talking to older family about '78 they say
it was a party since the city shutdown for a week, no work, just have fun ;-),
whereas the current winter has been more of an ongoing slog with storm after
storm.

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maalyex
Keep in mind that the techniques used to measure snowfall have changed over
time. Modern measurements are inflated as compared to older ones.

[https://www2.ucar.edu/atmosnews/perspective/14009/snowfall-m...](https://www2.ucar.edu/atmosnews/perspective/14009/snowfall-
measurement-flaky-history)

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chrisBob
Anyone can handle the bottom 90% of snow storms that they see. I am fine with
Boston having trouble this year just like I am not surprised when things close
for a few days in North Carolina for 6" of snow. Even mighty Watertown NY had
trouble a few times when I lived there, and those people are good at dealing
with it.

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vilhelm_s
I guess saying "the worst in the history of the city" is less impressive for
American cities, since they have not existed for very long... :)

At least we still do better than in the xkcd "Ice Sheets" comic
([http://xkcd.com/1225/](http://xkcd.com/1225/)).

~~~
nsxwolf
If another ice age like that comes early, we'd better hope we really know how
to kick anthropogenic global warming into high gear.

~~~
tsotha
Yeah, an ice age would be far worse than anything predicted for AGW.

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27182818284
Is there a place I can look up the L-score for an arbitrary winter in an
arbitrary city?

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joegyoung
Does this take in account global warming?

~~~
jessaustin
How would one do that?

~~~
spenrose
"What the massive snowfall in Boston tells us about global warming"

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-
environment/wp/201...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-
environment/wp/2015/02/10/what-the-massive-snowfall-in-boston-tells-us-about-
global-warming/)

“Sea surface temperatures off the coast of New England right now are at record
levels, 11.5C (21F) warmer than normal in some locations,” says Penn State
climate researcher Michael Mann. “There is [a] direct relationship between the
surface warmth of the ocean and the amount of moisture in the air. What that
means is that this storm will be feeding off these very warm seas, producing
very large amounts of snow as spiraling winds of the storm squeeze that
moisture out of the air, cool, it, and deposit it as snow inland.”

~~~
jessaustin
This link seems to imply that the record snowfall was caused by global
warming. That wasn't the question. The question was, _how_ could the writer of
TFA have changed his analysis of snowfall records to "account" in some fashion
for global warming? E.g., should old, theoretically pre-warming, records be
scaled down, or scaled up, or is there some other adjustment to be made?

~~~
tjradcliffe
Nobody knows. The climate is intensely non-linear, and as such can only be
predicted by models that are comparable in complexity to those for turbulent
flow.

This is not to say that anthropogenic climate change is not real--there is
plenty of evidence for it--but that climate models in their current state, and
in almost any plausible state to come, are not up to the task of addressing
these sorts of relatively short-term variations.

Even saying things that are probably true, like "Climate change will result in
more extreme weather events because the heat engine of the climate will have
more power behind it and it is being progressively pushed out of the mid-20th-
century near-equilibrium" doesn't tell us anything about specific
<em>types</em> of climate events. Maybe it'll result in more and heavier
snowfall. Maybe it'll result in more severe hurricanes. A hundred years from
now we'll have the data to look at the distributions so we can tell. Today, we
are largely in the dark.

Someone here quoted Michael Mann saying that high sea-surface temperatures
were responsible for more moisture in the air resulting in higher snowfall.
Well and good, but if New England experienced a series of unusually dry
winters we'd be pointing to high sea-surface temperatures changing wind
patterns resulting in drier air over the region, and so on. Almost any weather
event is capable of a nice linear-sounding "explanation", but weather
prediction is still terrible, which tells you how seriously those
"explanations" should be taken.

~~~
masklinn
One thing's for certain, we're going to live in interesting time (the bad
kind). A prediction a few decades ago was that if the Gulf Stream stopped,
European weather would look much more like America's.

Latitude-wise, Boston is about halfway between Rome and Florence, very
slightly south of Dubrovnik (which is used as the sets for Game of Thrones'
King's Landing and Qarth), Liverpool is a dead ringer for Edmonton.

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happyscrappy
The real problem was not having any melting so it just kept piling up. Two way
streets become one way and must be negotiated in situ, can't see around
corners etc.

~~~
acomjean
You're not kidding. I (oddly) graph the temp daily, and feb had about 3 days
where it broke freezing.

A fun city game: car or just snow mound?

The public transit didn't work, compounding the problem. My three mile commute
turned into 1.5 hr nightmare.

Finally Massachusetts is having a conversation about public transit. Fingers
crossed they'll fix it. Maybe in time for the Olympics!

~~~
slowmovintarget
I moved to the Boston area from Minneapolis... I miss the warmer, less snowy
weather.

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kuni-toko-tachi
Considering that records only go back a few hundred years, all a headline like
this does is sell digital newsprint. It is absolutely useless and has nothing
to do with the hoax of global warming. It is a data point with little meaning
and only slight newsworthyness.

