

Snow band update


Albany NEXRAD radar image from 9:36 a.m. on January 12th, 2011

In my earlier post, I mentioned that snow bands like the one that was impacting the Capital Region this morning typically don’t last very long.  Sure enough, you can see from the updated radar image that the band that was over eastern New York earlier this morning has essentially dissipated.  Only a few areas of higher radar reflectivities remain over eastern New York – meaning that the snow is coming down at a mostly light to locally moderate rate.

On the other hand, it’s a different story farther east:  the snow band over southern Vermont, western Massachusetts, and northern Connecticut is still going strong.  If you compare this radar image to the radar image I posted earlier, you’ll see that the band has been nearly stationary over western Massachusetts.  The result there:  continued very heavy snow there for at least the next couple of hours.

Categories: General
Heather Archambault

2 Responses

  1. Kathleen M says:

    Syracuse and Buffalo have been giving their snow storms names. If they get 7″ or more of snow in, I think, a 12 hour period, that storm is named. The last big storm in Syracuse was named “Carp”.

    Why doesn’t the Capital Region give our snow storms names and what would we name them??

  2. Kyle Griffin says:

    Kathleen – the National Weather Service office in Buffalo is responsible for forecasts in the Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo regions. Since these are the regions that get the most lake effect snow, the forecasters at the NWS Buffalo office have established a history of naming the lake effect events, or storms, similar to the way we name hurricanes. They’ve been doing it for quite some time, and you can see the 13 year archive of named events here:

    It’s not a particularly official or even well-known practice outside of the Lake Erie and Ontario regions, and is only done for storms with the area of responsibility of the NWS Buffalo office. Because the Capital Region experiences significantly less lake effect snow (and snow in general) than the regions to our west, I would assume that no one ever saw the need to try and organize the snow storms in quite the same manner.