SURFACE WIND DIRECTIONS ASSOCIATED WITH SNOWFALL IN UPSTATE NEW YORK: UPDATE FOR 1994-2000

摘要

As an update to an earlier study by Blechman, hourly observations of snowfall, recorded November through April for the seasons 1994-95 through 1999-2000 at National Weather Service stations mostly in New York State, were used to identify the wind directions observed during those hours. The distributions of winds during snowfall found in the earlier study using data from 1981 through 1994 were different for each station, but were consistent with lake-effect snow at stations near the Great Lakes and coastal storm snowfall at stations near the ocean. In the 1994-2000 data these characteristics were essentially unchanged, even though observations after 1994 were made with Automated Surface Observing Systems (ASOS) instead of being manually done. When separating the seasons into those, which could be identified as El Nino, La Nina, or neutral, some differences from the previous study's results were found. In particular, at the stations not associated with lake-effect snow, years in which El Nino conditions prevailed were not more frequently snowy as they had been from 1981-94. However, the lake-effect stations continued to show fewer snowfall hours during El Nino, especially with southwest to west winds, a result, which was similar to that of the previous study.