by Bill Evans
173.3
Steamboat Springs, CO
10,000
153.3
Oswego, NY
18,000
131.2
Sault Ste. Marie, MI
16,600
120.2
Syracuse, NY
147,300
118.2
Marquette, MI (city)
19,600
111.2
Meadville, PA
13,700
111.1
Flagstaff, AZ
53,000
110.8
Watertown, NY
26,700
105.9
Muskegon, MI
40,100
99.5
Rochester, NY
219,800
98.5
Utica, NY
60,600
97.9
Montpelier, NY
8,100
96.8
Traverse City, MI
14,500
95.7
Buffalo, NY
292,700
95.3
Juneau, AK
30,700
93.2
Presque Isle, ME
9,600
91.3
Cortland, NY
18,700
85.6
Casper, WY
49,700
83.3
Duluth, MN
87,700
82.6
Berlin, NH
10,300
81.6
Burlington, VT
38,900
* * *
* * *
Twenty Snowiest Locations in the Wild Wild West
SNOWFALL IN INCHES
LOCATION
680
Paradise Ranger Station, Mount Rainier, WA
552
Thompson Pass, AK
530
Mount Baker Lodge, WA
530
Crater Lake, OR
516
Alta, UT
471
Soda Springs, CA
445
Tamarack, CA
442
Stampede Pass, WA
436
Wolf Creek Pass, CO
429
Silver Lake Brighton, UT
395
Twin Lakes, CA
328
Valdez, AK
300
Kings Hill, MT
285
Bechler River Ranger Station, WY
283
Mullan Pass, ID
276
Snake River, WY
271
Climax, CO
265
Silver Lake, CO
257
Government Camp, OR
254
Holden Village, WA
* * *
Snowiest Places in the Whole Wide World!
What comes to mind when you think about the snowiest places in the world? Do you think of Siberia, the Alps, or Mount Everest? Actually, North America is the snowiest continent on Earth. What location comes in second?
It’s the Japanese Alps of Honshu Island, where scientists have measured the greatest snow depths on the planet. An incredible 466 inches (38.8 feet) was recorded at the 5,000-foot level of Mount Ibuki in 1927. The snowiest sea-level location in the world outside of Valdez, Alaska, can be found along Japan’s coast. The town of Takada, which sits on the Sea of Japan, averages over 262 inches (21.8 feet) of snowfall in a season. In a single month, January 1945, the town recorded 362 inches (30.1 feet) of snow. In just 24 hours on February 8, 1927, 58.6 inches (4.9 feet) fell.
The Alps of France and Switzerland are probably the snowiest regions of the world, after North America and Japan. Snowfalls above the 6,000-feet level average 200 to 600 inches (50 feet) each winter. In the Swiss Alps, Santis, at 8,200 feet, gets an average of 570 inches (47.5 feet) each winter. Bessans, in the French Alps region of Savoie, once received 67.8 inches (5.7 feet) of snow in a 19-hour period. This is one of the most intense and extreme snowfalls on record anywhere in the world.
Italy is also known for extreme snowfalls. The town of Montevegrine, in the southern Apennines, once had 54.4 inches (4.5 feet) of snow fall in 24 hours. In Sicily, the town of Floresta recorded 51.2 inches (42.7 feet) in 24 hours on February 22, 1929.
When one thinks of snow, Russia always comes to mind. Every part of that country experiences some kind of snow in winter. Many people think that Siberia has huge snowfalls, but it doesn’t. Siberia is so cold and dry that often it gets no more than 20 to 30 inches (1.7 to 2.5 feet) of snow in a year. In contrast, the Western Great Caucasus near Turkey and the Black Sea can have accumulations of 150 to 200 inches (12.5 to 16.7 feet) in one winter. Talk about extreme!
Great Britain’s greatest storm took place in only 15 hours. A near world record snow of 70.9 inches (5.9 feet) fell on Dartmoor on February 16, 1929. Norway, too, is a big snow producer—the Jostedalsbreen Mountains at Fanaraken rake in more than 400 inches (33 feet) of snow in a season. Also in Scandinavia, Sweden’s Kebnekaise Mountains see accumulations of 240 inches (16.7 feet) of snow during the winters.
Holy Geez! I Didn’t Know You Could Do That with Snow!
People can do some really cool stuff with snow.
I always love to make snowmen. One of my favorite cartoons is Calvin and Hobbs. Now this is my kind of “How to make a go in the snow!”
Homework, Schmomework! Calvin is da’ man!
Nothing Like an Avalanche to Perk Up Your Day!
Technically, an avalanche is any amount of snow sliding down a mountainside. An avalanche can be compared to a landslide, only with snow instead of earth. People who live in areas that get a lot of snow also call avalanches “snowslides.”
As an avalanche moves toward the bottom of a slope, it gains speed and power; this can cause even the smallest of avalanches to be a major disaster!
Many kinds of snow can form avalanches—it all depends on the region, temperature, and weather. Whether the snow is light and fluffy, wet, thick slabs, or flying powder, all avalanches are potentially very dangerous.
Avalanches happen on mountains where extreme amounts of snow fall and build up. They claim about 150 lives a year worldwide, with hundreds more injured or trapped. Don’t ski or hike in areas that are marked off due to a possible avalanche!
FEMA/Andrea Booher
Need to Control an Avalanche? Let’s Blow It Up!
Only experts are allowed to “create” an avalanche. By deliberately triggering a small, hopefully controlled avalanche, mountain experts hope to release the stresses on the snow that might cause a large, uncontrolled avalanche.
Percussion guns, explosives, and even artillery have been used to produce these controlled avalanches. When an avalanche is to be set off, warnings are issued and people are kept away from areas of potential danger.
Release the Hounds!
Avalanche dogs are a must on any mountain, large or small, and even in flat regions where snow sports are popular. Skiing, hiking, snowboarding, and just about any other snow-related activity you can imagine create plenty of opportunities for accidents. Children get lost, elderly people fall and get covered by snow, and, of course, avalanches are all great reasons to have an avalanche dog around.
In the 1930s, the Swiss Army came up with the idea of using a dog’s superior sense of smell to locate people buried in the snow. Once a person is buried in the snow, detection is impossible with the naked eye, but rescue dogs can pick up the human scent easily, making a live recovery possible.
Training is intense. It often takes three years of dedication for the dog as well as the handler before the team is proficient at finding victims in the snow. The dog is taught to not only locate humans, but to also alert everyone and to dig out the victim!
Now that’s a goooooooood doggie!
Let’s Melt It, Dude!
Rather than hauling the snow away and dumping it in rivers, many cities are now using huge snowmelters. It can
melt fourteen dump-truck loads in an hour!
* * *
I Didn’t Know It Could Snow That Hard!
* * *
A New York Story: The Coldest Day Ever in New York City!
New York City has a great history when it comes to snow and cold, captured not only in pictures, but also in the stories that accompany some of the greatest weather moments in the history of the Big Apple. Cold waves and blizzards are the highlights of over three centuries of record keeping in New York City.
Currier & Ives
A massive cold wave swept the Northeast in 1857. January of that year is the coldest month ever recorded in New England. The average temperatures of 16.7°F (-8.5°C) in New Haven, 16.8°F (-8.4°C) in Boston, and 19.6°F (-6.9°C) in New York City remain the coldest months on record. On the 23rd of that month, the Smithsonian thermometer at Erasmus Hall in Brooklyn, New York, reached a high temperature of 0°F (-17.8°C). The Hudson River froze over solidly enough that small food and shop carts could be set up on the river. It was solid enough for people to walk back and forth to New Jersey. That cold wave was captured by Currier and Ives in their two famous prints of New York City and Central Park.
There are several famous blizzards in New York City’s history, but none so extreme or bizarre as the Blizzard of 1888. March is a month of extremes as far as temperatures go, and March 1888 was truly extreme. Friday, March 9, 1888, had been the warmest day of the year; shopkeepers advertised SPRING OPENING DAY, and city residents enjoyed balmy weekend temperatures in the 50s! Walt Whitman wrote a poem for the New York Herald that ended with the line, “The spring’s first dandelion shows its true face.”
Currier & Ives
But on the morning of Monday, March 12, commuters were caught off guard. A heavy whiteout type of snow fell all day long. Wind gusts were above hurricane strength at 80 mph. Snowdrifts piled above 20 feet. By afternoon, the city was smothered in a blanket of white. Power and telephone lines had fallen throughout the boroughs. Thousands of commuters were trapped in unheated elevated trains, and horse-drawn carriages were stuck in the drift-filled streets.
Digging out in Flushing, New York, after the Blizzard of 1888.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce
A train wreck caused by the Blizzard of 1888.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce
The New York Stock Exchange closed for the first time due to weather since it had opened in 1792. The ferries stopped running and Broadway theaters closed. More than two hundred ships were wrecked off New York Harbor that day.
The blizzard caused at least two hundred deaths in New York City. After the storm, frozen bodies were recovered from snowdrifts. Livery drivers froze to death in the cabs of their carriages. Horses died in harness. Two hundred more people died throughout the Northeast.
All this devastation did have a silver lining. The events of the blizzard led the city to begin burying telephone and electrical wiring, and to build an underground subway system that is currently the largest in the world.
However, true to the New York way of life, during that infamous blizzard, Daly’s Theatre did not disappoint the few, intrepid theatergoers who battled 20-foot snowdrifts to get to that evening’s performance of Shakespeare. What show was it? You guessed it! A Midsummer Night’s Dream! As they say on Broadway, “The show must go on!”
The Storm of the Century On March 7, 1993, I was working in the weather office at WABC-TV in New York City, getting ready for another day of TV and radio broadcasts, when I noticed what appeared to be a potentially significant storm developing over the American Southwest.
National Weather Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce
Experience told me that this storm would likely blow through the Southeast and then turn up the East Coast—and that it would be messy. Boy, was it ever! This storm came to define extreme for a blizzard. Snowfall amounts averaged 2 feet—an average of 24 inches of snow fell onto most places from the southeastern United States, up the Eastern Seaboard to New England. From Maine to Georgia, snow and high winds buried the East Coast. Snow fell on nearly every inch of Alabama, a very rare occurrence. Seventeen inches alone fell in Birmingham, Alabama. This event, which lasted from March 12th to the 15th in the United States, came to be known as the Storm of the Century!
The storm was of biblical proportions. We had a reporter doing a live shot at a Long Island beach. As tropical storm–force winds of 55 mph blasted his face with snow, ice, and flying sand, he proclaimed, “All we need now is a plague of locusts!” Eighteen homes on Long Island were washed into the sea due to the pounding surf and many marinas were damaged or destroyed.
Half the states in the United States were affected in one way or another. In Florida, a 12-foot storm surge killed seven people, and a nasty outbreak of fifty tornadoes took eighteen lives. Three million people lost power, 270 people died on land, and 48 more were lost at sea. Powerful waves hammered the Northeast coast.
National Weather Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce
As you can see, a blizzard can bring plenty of destruction as well as a lot of snow! The estimated cost of the cleanup was $6 billion.
Record amounts of snow fell on places that normally do not get a lot of snow. The Florida Panhandle received half a foot of snow. Chattanooga, Tennessee, which normally sees about 4 inches of snow in a season, got blanketed with 20 inches. The New York City area averaged 24 to 29 inches of snow. Powerful, howling winds blew out windows from skyscrapers, raining glass daggers onto those below.
Syracuse, New York, was pounded with 43 inches of snow. In Georgia, 1.3 million chickens died. Atlanta issued its first blizzard warning in history as the city received 9 inches of snow. Two hundred hikers had to be rescued by helicopter in the Great Smokey Mountains, where 4 feet of snow fell. Boston cancelled its St. Patrick’s Day Parade for the first time ever. Winds were recorded in the Florida Keys at 109 mph…and the storm was just beginning! The winds at Mount Washington, New Hampshire, raced across the Presidential Range, gusting to 144 mph. The temperature in Burlington, Vermont, plunged to -12º F (-24.4°C). The record low pressure of the storm, 28.38 inches at White Plains, New York, was blamed for an unusually high number of childbirths!
The total amount of snow was huge! The normal ratio of rain to snow is that 1 inch of liquid makes 10 inches of snow. If the air mass is colder, then even more snow can result. After the Storm of the Century, the National Weather Service reported that if the amount of snow that fell had been rain, it would have been forty times the volume of water that flows out of the Mississippi River at New Orleans in one day! In another highlight, Mount Leconte in Tennessee received a whopping 56 inches of snow!
Can Somebody Toss Me a Shovel? I Gotta Get Outta Here!
I remember the storm vividly. New York City was smothered with 2 feet of snow. New Jersey had nearly 30 inches in Newark and Patterson. The snow piled high enough to cover the roofs of the cars that were unfortunately parked at curbside—cars that were buried even deeper when the snowplows came through. Many vehicles were left in place until the snow melted. I did a weather report standing on the top of a completely covered SUV. I dug out the top to show that the SUV was actually under there!
* True Bill Evans Weather Story *
The Blizzard of 1996
Just three years later, another gigantic blizzard struck the East Coast. This was the second storm to have a huge impact on me, personally and professionally. I’ll tell you about the first a little later.
It was Tuesday, January 2, 1996, and I was doing the weather live at 5 A.M. in beautiful Prospect Park, Brooklyn. I was riding a 60-inch Flexible Flyer sled (the greatest sled ever built!) that had been lent to me by a good friend and colleague, Fred Chieco. Flying down the snow-covered hills of that beautiful place in the morning sun on live television was a delight—until I had to tell New Yorkers
of an impending blizzard that was soon to blast not only New York City, but the entire tristate area, New England, and the whole East Coast!
The only problem with the forecast was that the storm wouldn’t reach the area until Sunday. I admit, predicting a blizzard five days before it was due to hit was risky. But the computer models had been very good at forecasting winter storms that year and I felt confident in their information, so I went with my gut and went public with my prediction. Everyone thought I was crazy!
Snow started falling Saturday afternoon, January 6, and by the time it stopped snowing early on Monday, January 8, the storm was as devastating as the blizzard of 1993. The snow was heaviest in the Virginias, Washington, D.C., Maryland, New Jersey, Connecticut, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, and throughout New England. Most of the snowfall records from the Storm of the Century were broken.
The cost in damage, lost sales, and decreased production was estimated at nearly $17 billion. The New York City school system was closed for snow on that Monday, January 8, for the first time in 20 years. Then mayor Rudy Giuliani declared that no cars could come into the city. You could leave with your car, but you could not come back. Snow packed the streets so tightly even buses and garbage trucks could not pass.