The 2022 Christmas Week Blizzard killed 44 people in western New York, making it the deadliest winter storm on record. Meteorologist Don Paul explains the meteorology and impacts of a remarkable storm that inflicted catastrophic impacts on a region accustomed to severe winter weather.

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Transcript:

00;00;00;10 - 00;00;22;00
Hal Needham
Imagine leaving home early on a wet December morning to finish some holiday shopping. It's just two days until Christmas and you have your checklist next to you with all the last minute gifts you still have to buy. But before you can make it to the store and return home. A violent lake effect blizzard sets in with hurricane force wind gusts and snow so heavy that you find yourself in a complete whiteout.

00;00;22;19 - 00;00;45;08
Hal Needham
Your trip to the store turns into a fight for survival as your car gets buried under massive snow drifts and you don't know when you'll be found. PAYGO trackers. This is Dr. Hal, host of the Jio Trek podcast. And this episode will dig deep into the Christmas Week blizzard of 2022. That pounded western New York, inflicting 44 fatalities on a region usually accustomed to heavy snowfall.

00;00;46;07 - 00;01;16;06
Hal Needham
Our guest is Dan Paul, a broadcast meteorologist since 1976 who has been forecasting lake effect snow in Buffalo since 1984. Dan holds the American Meteorological Society or AMS seal of approval for television weather casting and is a professional member of the AMS. He served a three year term on the AMS Board of Broadcast Meteorology and has recently completed five years on the AMS Appeals panel for AMS, SEAL and CBM candidates.

00;01;16;23 - 00;01;38;04
Hal Needham
I came across Don on a PBS NewsHour feature on the Christmas Week blizzard and he was gracious to agree to do an interview for the Geo Trek podcast. Hey, if you're new to the podcast, Trek investigates the impact of extreme weather and natural disasters on individuals and communities. Our goal is to help you improve your decision making, risk assessment and communication related to extreme events.

00;01;38;12 - 00;01;59;05
Hal Needham
So you can take action to make yourself, your family and your community more resilient. Before we jump into this conversation with Don, we have a quick favor to ask of you. We'd really appreciate if you take a moment to subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast platform. Your subscription helps us mark professional progress, which ensures many more episodes of the Geo Trek podcast in the future.

00;01;59;21 - 00;02;20;13
Hal Needham
Well, hey, let's jump into this episode 63 here with with Don Paul as we look back at the Christmas week blizzard of 2022 in western New York and learn more about the science behind the lake effect snow. By the way, if you're keeping score, this is a fifth podcast that we've done now that's based in New York State Out of the previous four or three of them actually focus on severe winter weather.

00;02;20;14 - 00;02;46;16
Hal Needham
Those are podcast episodes 15, 17 and 27. Episode 52 Look back at the ten year anniversary of Superstorm Sandy that was also recorded in New York State on Long Island and aired really later in 2022. So let's jump into this episode here with Don Paul. It's going to be a great one if you're into winter weather or just really want to know about how people manage and survive through severe weather conditions.

00;02;47;22 - 00;02;50;28
Hal Needham
Don, really appreciate you taking time to come on the podcast.

00;02;51;28 - 00;02;53;26
Don Paul
Happy to be here. I've got time.

00;02;54;05 - 00;03;07;08
Hal Needham
Don, you have spent a lot of time, many years, many decades forecasting lake effect snow in western New York and the greater Buffalo metropolitan area. Could you walk us through a little bit of your your career and your journey up there?

00;03;07;24 - 00;03;45;29
Don Paul
Well, prior to my getting to Buffalo in 1984, I worked for five years in Detroit as a weekend meteorologist and a science editor during the week. And when I got the job in Buffalo, I had a few months to spare and I began going out to what was then the Weather Service Forecast office for Michigan, which was in Ann Arbor, and they had journal articles and I would read articles on Lake Effect snow, one of which was coauthored by a fellow named Tom Mitchell, who went on to be the meteorologist in charge of the Buffalo office.

00;03;45;29 - 00;04;06;22
Don Paul
Years later. And I read it and I read it and I read it and I got here and the then meteorologist in charge, or as they call them, the M.C. invited me to come out and meet the people. And I told them I read such and such papers. And he said, Well, you can read papers, and that is important, but you have to live it.

00;04;07;19 - 00;04;40;19
Don Paul
And he gave me a decision tree paper, which had been written in the early eighties or late seventies for the smaller offices that no longer exist, that were they were staffed primarily by knowledgeable technicians rather than degreed meteorologists. The Rochester office, Syracuse office. And it was an excellent decision tree because it asked questions in such and such mood go you know, decision trees where I'd go on to the next and.

00;04;40;27 - 00;04;41;15
Hal Needham
Kind of like a flow.

00;04;42;07 - 00;05;08;05
Don Paul
Yeah and it it had one sheet which I still have next to me on my computer desk although I have it memorized for the Lake Erie potential for lake effect snow which towns and cities are going to be impacted by which wind direction. And for your listeners, the wind directions and forecasting lake snow need to be really precise.

00;05;08;19 - 00;05;26;29
Don Paul
Now we can tell people that I if I'm giving a talk, it takes a Southwest forward to get Buffalo sacked by Lake snow. But Southwest isn't really good enough because these bands can often be just 5 to 10 miles in width. They can extend for many miles in length.

00;05;27;09 - 00;05;29;09
Hal Needham
It's really training, right? It's like a train.

00;05;30;00 - 00;05;59;10
Don Paul
Yeah. And it's a convective drainage if you are flying. And final approach to come into Buffalo International and you were coming up from Cleveland, you'd see a string of low capped convective cells. And if it's really well developed, you get thundersnow. Sure. And this this paper saved me in the blizzard of 1985, my first big lake effect storm I got here in August of 84.

00;05;59;10 - 00;06;22;19
Don Paul
Nothing was happening. And then a an event began shaping up, which even with the more primitive models, the we didn't think they were primitive back then of the era of 1984. You you knew something big was coming, began showing up on a monday that by Saturday or Sunday, some part of Western New York was really going to get hammered.

00;06;22;24 - 00;06;52;00
Don Paul
Sure. A really powerful cold front and then southwest winds behind the front. And I learned in this decision tree that a wind, if you picture the face of a compass, a wind coming from 255 degrees will miss a lot of typically miss a lot of downtown Buffalo, but south Buffalo and some eastern suburbs, it takes 250 degrees to get it into the heart of Buffalo.

00;06;52;00 - 00;07;14;12
Don Paul
Out to the airport. And if it's a strong enough band, it can sometimes reach all the way to near Rochester. And 245 degrees tends to miss Buffalo and gets the densely populated suburbs just to the north of the city. So I realized, well, this is fantastic information because I would have had to take a compass and a protractor.

00;07;14;21 - 00;07;43;07
Don Paul
Sure. During the what turned out to be the budget of 85 to figure out which towns were getting lined up although that storm was so enormous, it was a hybrid between wide, wide spread snow with an embedded intense lake effect band in the widespread we call it Synoptic, No. So it hit quite a large area. And the models at the time didn't do a great job with the precise direction.

00;07;44;12 - 00;08;19;00
Don Paul
And our forecasts were really very good considering that there was imprecision in the wind directions. And we we were fortunate. And there's also the experience involved of the people at the National Weather Service Forecast office had been forecasting lake effect before the era of computer models and knew to look upwind at what surface winds were doing in western Michigan, in Wisconsin, what the upper level winds were showing in in the blue weather balloon soundings and could still do a pretty good job.

00;08;20;27 - 00;08;28;13
Hal Needham
So, Don, it sounds like you're saying just a five degrees shift on that campus. You're getting a whole new area with this tremendous snowfall.

00;08;28;26 - 00;08;57;28
Don Paul
Yes. And in western New York, the most densely populated part of our television area covers eight counties, but the most densely populated portion of western New York is the northern half of Erie County from the city of the immediate suburbs just to the south of Buffalo, through Buffalo and into the northern suburbs. That's where the population is densest and there's five degrees difference.

00;08;57;28 - 00;09;05;27
Don Paul
And you warn the wrong part of northern Erie County. So it's not good enough to just say, well, winds from the southwest, that'll do it.

00;09;06;23 - 00;09;09;26
Hal Needham
It's like what precise vector from the southwest. Right.

00;09;09;26 - 00;09;41;24
Don Paul
And we've had so much improvement in the last 20 years in these high resolution models. One of the great models called Buckhead is now administered from Norman, Oklahoma, but it was developed in Buffalo as a lake effect tool. And then even some of the great tornado specialists like Dr. Howie boosting at the University of Oklahoma, said this tool will work for severe convection in the summer, too.

00;09;41;24 - 00;09;52;12
Don Paul
And there that was developed here. And then Norman took it over. The National Weather Service has tremendous centers on the campus of the University of Oklahoma.

00;09;52;13 - 00;10;08;28
Hal Needham
Well, if our listeners haven't really seen huge lake snow, you know, like if you're even in, say, New Jersey when there's a nor'easter, really the sky is just a slate gray with that east wind off the Atlantic Ocean. What you're talking about here really is convective cells. And like you said, you can get thundersnow, right?

00;10;09;12 - 00;10;33;03
Don Paul
Yes. And we get it frequently. I grew up in the New York area, and once in a while as a kid, I'd hear thunder go boom. I lived right across the river from Manhattan in my part of Jersey was pronounced Jersey. And and here we hear it. It still seems to shock people, but it happens very frequently here during intense lake effect.

00;10;33;03 - 00;10;39;19
Don Paul
And as you know, generally, if you're in thundersnow, that's about as hard as it can.

00;10;39;19 - 00;10;41;26
Hal Needham
SNOW Oh, yeah. It's coming down really hard.

00;10;41;26 - 00;10;55;11
Don Paul
Down bars like a thunderstorm or cloudburst, I should say, of snow. And if the winds are strong, it's always a total whiteout. And it's pretty terrifying to drive try to drive in.

00;10;55;26 - 00;11;15;24
Hal Needham
And I think something else for our listeners to appreciate. I used to live over a little east of you over by the Binghamton area, but I was a winter sports athlete, so I drove up north of Syracuse into the Tug Hill Plateau looking for heavy snow to train. And I can remember times where it's sunny, where I'm at, and you can see these almost like convective cells, just maybe three miles away.

00;11;16;03 - 00;11;22;13
Hal Needham
And all of a sudden, as you're driving into them, it goes from a sunny day to a complete whiteout in really just minutes.

00;11;22;24 - 00;11;50;12
Don Paul
You know, we had a huge lake effect event in November of 2014, mostly over the southern suburbs. The extreme south end of Buffalo got hammered. My television station, I'm semi-retired now, but I our television station is in North Buffalo. North Buffalo got a total over two separate events in a week of four inches. South Buffalo got 48 inches.

00;11;50;12 - 00;12;23;19
Don Paul
Wow. And then many of the southern suburbs got up to seven feet. Wow. And if you were to there were fantastic videos and yeah, no photos made of the wall of snow from a vantage point north of that lake effect band. And they they were circulated internationally. It was spectacular, this enormous convective wall and the person taking the picture to the north would often have his immediate foreground bathed in sunshine.

00;12;23;26 - 00;12;31;26
Don Paul
Sure. And you see the string of thunderstorms to the south south, just all connected together and streaming in from the lake.

00;12;32;06 - 00;12;45;29
Hal Needham
I seen that actually as a time lapse. Right. And you can see it just to his south. Sometimes he's in the sun, but it's just it literally is a wall of snow. One of the most amazing things I've seen. It's like a white curtain, basically. And you can see there's motion, I think, on the screen from right to left.

00;12;46;05 - 00;12;58;19
Don Paul
Yeah. Because very not always, but very often with lake effect, they're very strong winds around the north and south edge of that band and the clouds really hustle along.

00;12;58;19 - 00;13;03;07
Hal Needham
Yeah. They're moving quickly and it's really low level right. This is all like low level of the atmosphere, right.

00;13;03;19 - 00;13;38;25
Don Paul
Yeah. The key, the key layer to determine whether you're going to get strong lake effect as far as temperatures go, is the difference in temperature between the lake surface and the atmosphere about a mile up. Okay. I'm 5000 feet. And then the other element is, are the winds well aligned through that entire layer and up to 10,000 feet, If you have a southwest wind, say, from 250 degrees at the surface, but just let's say 3000 feet up, the winds are from 210 degrees.

00;13;39;03 - 00;13;47;27
Don Paul
That creates a wind shear that will disrupt the lake. Then you need well aligned winds as well as that temperature drop off. Right. The labs. Right.

00;13;48;09 - 00;13;55;15
Hal Needham
So a steep lapse rate and then really aligned winds maybe in the lower and middle part of the atmosphere is really what you're looking for.

00;13;55;29 - 00;14;17;14
Don Paul
Yes. And that's in that decision tree I mentioned to you earlier, it said are the winds well aligned up to 10,000 feet? Is there more than 30 degrees? Change in wind direction within that layer? And then if you said yes that, then it would say no for intense lake effect and you'd go to a different part of the decision tree, Where are you going to get any.

00;14;17;14 - 00;14;18;10
Don Paul
Yeah, a little bit.

00;14;18;11 - 00;14;24;22
Hal Needham
Not much. Yeah, I got you. It sounds like when the winds align and you have that steep temperature lapse, right, then you can really get pounded.

00;14;24;29 - 00;14;30;05
Don Paul
Yeah. And we had that in our blizzard at Christmas time, Don.

00;14;30;13 - 00;14;45;16
Hal Needham
Talking, talking about how localized these things are before we started recording. This is an amazing story you were telling me about. You would get phone calls at the station with people telling you to call their boss that where they are. It really was snowing like crazy. Could you explain that story?

00;14;46;01 - 00;15;12;09
Don Paul
Yeah. I get occasional phone calls and this is before the year where everyone had radar apps on their smartphones. Someone would call me in Orchard Park, which is where the bills play. And in the average winter, Orchard Park gets a lot more snow than Buffalo. And in fact, this year in November, Orchard Park had a lake effect event with an all time.

00;15;12;09 - 00;15;33;00
Don Paul
No one keeps official records for Orchard Park, but they got 81 inches. Wow. In this event. Well, I would occasionally get a call from someone in Orchard Park saying, Could you use my boss's phone number in downtown Buffalo? Could you please do you have time to call him and tell him because the sun was shining brilliantly in Buffalo.

00;15;33;19 - 00;15;34;19
Hal Needham
What's what's the distance.

00;15;34;26 - 00;15;37;09
Don Paul
In Orchard Park? And I can't get out of my driveway.

00;15;37;16 - 00;15;40;06
Hal Needham
What's the distance there between Orchard Park and downtown Buffalo?

00;15;41;08 - 00;15;44;28
Don Paul
I'd say 17, 18 miles.

00;15;45;10 - 00;15;53;03
Hal Needham
Okay, so maybe it's snowing like crazy in Orchard Park and it has been 4 hours and you're saying 1780 miles away. No snow and sunshine.

00;15;53;16 - 00;16;26;28
Don Paul
Yeah. And sometimes there's a band that's exceedingly narrow. When our National Weather Service Doppler radar went online in December of 1995, there was a band that was only five miles wide. It was a lot longer. And and then would skinny, but you could go just two or three miles and go from blinding snow to the edge of the band and see the sun come out down.

00;16;27;16 - 00;16;48;09
Hal Needham
So how does this relate to daily life in the wintertime in Buffalo? I mean, are there times where people will not commute across town because they know a band is setting up? I mean, how obviously there can be big impacts. Some of these snows snow rates can be tremendous. How does this play out like in people's decision making with moving around the metro area?

00;16;48;12 - 00;17;12;11
Don Paul
Well, I know how it should play out, but it doesn't always work out that way. We had the largest loss of life in the metro, not just Buffalo, but in Western New York's history due to weather in our Christmas blizzard. And it total death toll, the majority of it in the city of Buffalo, but also some outside of the city.

00;17;12;16 - 00;17;40;20
Don Paul
Total death toll, 44. And that's just extraordinary. There had been a ground blizzard in 1977 before I got here. And December 76 and January 77 were extreme winters for the portions of the Midwest and the Great Lakes. In fact, there were natural gas shortages. Sure. And snow kept piling up all over. Lake Erie, froze in an all time record early days.

00;17;41;13 - 00;17;55;21
Don Paul
And the this the snow just kept piling up in Lake Erie and the landscape and all this low density snow because the temperature had been frigid most days. It was not water laden packed snow.

00;17;55;22 - 00;17;56;21
Hal Needham
It was pretty powdery.

00;17;57;14 - 00;18;18;03
Don Paul
Yeah. And a cold front came through on January 28th in the late morning. And then national Weather Service at the time and again, this is, you know, with very primitive models. They put out special statements and said things were going to get rough. But that storm for intensity was under forecast and 29 people were lost.

00;18;18;14 - 00;18;20;11
Hal Needham
This is a 77 ground blizzard.

00;18;20;22 - 00;18;45;14
Don Paul
Yeah. And it's only estimated because it was so incredibly windy for a number of days in a row, about a foot of snow fell and pilots were reporting, you know, bright blue skies and they make little notations in the quote that they use on that teletype circuit. Pirate pilot reports can see ground blizzard. You know, they could see the ground was obscured.

00;18;46;04 - 00;18;50;13
Don Paul
But just in just the tiny distance above the ground, it was totally clear.

00;18;50;24 - 00;18;56;07
Hal Needham
And when you say ground blizzard, so there's not really snow falling. It could just be blowing snow that was already on the ground.

00;18;56;10 - 00;19;19;11
Don Paul
Yeah, there was there was no open water on Lake Erie. A lot of winters with Lake Erie. Right. Right now, it is wide open. The lake temperature as of yesterday in Buffalo is 37, which means that the right set up came along. We have the potential to have another major event prob almost certainly not quite the magnitude of the Christmas blizzard.

00;19;19;11 - 00;19;47;00
Don Paul
Our worst storm in history. But the pattern we're in at the time we're recording this doesn't show any true polar air coming in at least until or maybe around the 22nd or 23rd of January, which is a good thing. But the Great Lakes right now are only at three point something percent ice cover, and that includes Lake Superior, which is way below average for this time of the year.

00;19;47;04 - 00;20;01;27
Hal Needham
And so generally open water like that, even though, you know, no one would want to go swimming in 37 degree water, there still is some some heat and some energy available If you get a cold enough air system to kind of blow over that. Right. You could really still get two lakes lake effect snow set up.

00;20;02;07 - 00;20;31;22
Don Paul
Yeah, and that worries us a little bit because we can't really predict some of the variables that could set you up for that. Some of the oscillations in the atmosphere between the ocean and the North Atlantic oscillation in the Arctic oscillation, we can't really predict those more than two weeks in advance whether they're going to be in their cold phase, which would favor a polar outbreak in the Great Lakes in the northeast or in their warm phase.

00;20;32;05 - 00;20;59;08
Don Paul
And there are some signs now that they're going back to a cold phase later in the month. And because like Lake Erie, when it does freeze, usually has some fissures in the ice, some openings which can still allow some limited lake effect snow, even though people think the lake is frozen, it's not truly frozen. In 1977, it was truly frozen because it was just so extraordinarily cold.

00;20;59;08 - 00;21;46;08
Don Paul
You know, they were they were closing factories to preserve natural gas for homes and schools. And we haven't had a winter like that since it was another era. But right, right now, when you asked that question earlier, had a Buffalo needs respond to this kind of horrific storm when the majority of people say, well, I'm not going out there, but I'm fortunately and tragically enough people did go out sometime, some of the fatalities, a few of them were cars driving in from southern Erie County to come and look at it and where they lived.

00;21;46;27 - 00;22;19;04
Don Paul
There was some snow, but it certainly wasn't a whiteout. And they drove in and got disoriented and the snow was so ferocious there couldn't be any plowing during the teeth of a blizzard. Police cars could hardly find people. You know, our first responders were putting their lives on the line because we knew there were abandoned cars and some of those cars had people in them and there were pedestrians there, people who lost power because we had peak wind gusts frequent goes to over 60 miles an hour and a few gusts over 70.

00;22;19;22 - 00;22;47;11
Don Paul
And people in a frozen house, well, not literally frozen, but no electricity in the house is dropping into the upper thirties with go out. A few of them were looking for the city's warming centers. There were four warming warning centers, but two of those lost power and a few these people froze to death or died from hypothermia falling into the snow and their bodies were found lying, lying in the snow.

00;22;47;14 - 00;23;04;13
Hal Needham
When people get buried in their car, in snow is the primary health danger, hypothermia? Could they run out of oxygen? Could there be carbon monoxide if they're trying to run their car and their heater and maybe, you know, snow gets in the tailpipe? I mean, what are the health dangers there?

00;23;04;13 - 00;23;33;07
Don Paul
It's a combination of hypothermia and or carbon monoxide. In most cases, if the tailpipe is blocked by a snowdrift and that carbon monoxide level can slowly build the fatal risk inside the car. You know, I worked in Wichita, Kansas, in the mid seventies and we used to get all the forecast statements on our no or weather wire from the Cheyenne, Wyoming office.

00;23;33;07 - 00;23;55;04
Don Paul
And back then, the National Weather Service had a second tier blizzard warning called severe blizzard warning. And for that, the winds had to be over 45 miles an hour and that's 35. And they still had a temperature criteria. It had to be for severe blizzard under ten degrees. And I remember there were two, two or three severe blizzard warnings.

00;23;55;04 - 00;24;16;01
Don Paul
While nothing was going on in Wichita from the Cheyenne office. And they had formatted into the warning statement to become and I'm not paraphrasing, I'm pretty sure, in fact, I know it said to become lost in a storm of this magnitude is to invite certain death. Wow.

00;24;16;01 - 00;24;17;02
Hal Needham
That's very strong word.

00;24;17;04 - 00;24;40;18
Don Paul
Urologists I work with had been out in the plains for some years. I was only there, I was new and I said, Wow, Jim, look at this. He goes, Have you ever been on the high plains? Because Wichita is on the plains, but it's not the high plains. And he said there are no landmarks. If you you you stay in your car, you think a highway patrol car is going to come by and a total whiteout.

00;24;41;05 - 00;25;05;17
Don Paul
What are your chances of being found? And if you decide I'm getting out of this car and look for a house, you're going to die pretty quickly in that incredible wind chill and this storm, had there still been severe blizzard warnings, would have qualified not for the temperature criteria has been removed from blizzard warnings. It's not it's no longer in it.

00;25;06;02 - 00;25;14;26
Don Paul
But as far as the winds and visibility go, this would have been a severe blizzard under that old warning that they don't don't use any done.

00;25;14;26 - 00;25;17;12
Hal Needham
What are the official criteria for a blizzard?

00;25;18;15 - 00;25;50;05
Don Paul
Well, the essential criteria is visibility a quarter mile or less in falling or blowing snow. And, you know, those ground blizzards, we had that 77 ground blizzard. They're not that common around here. They're much more common in the plains, especially the high plains. And also winds averaging over 35 miles per hour for three consecutive hours or frequently gusting to over 35 for 3 hours or longer.

00;25;50;13 - 00;26;05;29
Don Paul
There's no temperature criteria and accumulations don't mean anything because when you have winds of that magnitude, only two or three inches of low density snow will produce visibility under a quarter mile and often near near zero or at zero.

00;26;06;05 - 00;26;16;12
Hal Needham
So technically, it's a it's a wind speed and a visibility thing. It doesn't matter how much snow you get. It doesn't really anymore matter what the temperature is, it's the visibility and the wind speed.

00;26;16;28 - 00;26;34;09
Don Paul
Yes. And people have a tendency to call every bad snowstorm or blizzard and I'm not the only one. I try to be a stickler on that because it's really a severe weather term and I don't. And my friends at the National Weather Service don't want to see it watered down.

00;26;34;09 - 00;26;38;25
Hal Needham
Yeah. If we start using that for every 12 inch snowfall, then all of a sudden we're.

00;26;38;25 - 00;26;57;05
Don Paul
With a high wind warning. Yeah, yeah. People call it a very windy day. High winds in the newspaper, which I write, but I have written articles saying there's a reason we have this tickler definition of, you know, you need peak gusts over 58 or sustained winds over 40 for an hour longer.

00;26;57;09 - 00;27;14;18
Hal Needham
Don, I think that's so important. I live in Galveston, Texas. The deadliest natural disaster happened right in my neighborhood. Right. But about two years ago, we had a Category one hurricane hit down the coast here on the island. Our sustained winds were in the mid forties with gusts to the mid fifties. The next day everyone was saying, oh, we survived a hurricane.

00;27;14;18 - 00;27;33;13
Hal Needham
And I was and I'm not a real critical person, but I, I took exception to that and said, please do not tell people this was a hurricane. We have a lot of new people here that are going to say, oh, hurricanes aren't that bad, right? And then someday there actually will be hurricane force winds and it'll blow their mind because it's way beyond what we saw.

00;27;33;19 - 00;27;44;27
Hal Needham
That's what I see happening. If we start watering this down and calling, you know, heavy snow blizzards, then people say, oh, when a blizzard warning actually comes, people say, Oh, I've been through that before and they really have it.

00;27;45;09 - 00;28;19;25
Don Paul
Yeah. And there's some controversy. There's quite a bit of controversy here over whether our local political leadership believed the words they were saying. They believed the National Weather Service and the day prior to the blizzard, we had rain on a Thursday night and temperatures were close to 40 degrees. But the county executive and Governor Hochul was here and the mayor of Buffalo were all urging people to get their business done.

00;28;19;25 - 00;28;37;00
Don Paul
Now, because you don't want to be out there tomorrow. Sure. But when the blizzard warning the blizzard warning was issued a day in advance, which is also unusual, typically a blizzard warning doesn't get issued until it's already happening or it's imminent in the next hour.

00;28;37;01 - 00;28;40;17
Hal Needham
So this was a pretty good lead time for blizzard conditions.

00;28;40;17 - 00;29;15;17
Don Paul
Yes. But I think a lot of people who have a tendency to remember blown forecasts or ultra forecasted storms or what they think we're over forecasted. Storms say the roads are wet. I got last minute Christmas shopping. I have to get done. You know, I haven't bought anything for my husband yet and went out there, even though this had been every television stations lead story, the Buffalo News articles I was on social media like crazy and that just me.

00;29;16;28 - 00;30;02;07
Don Paul
I think there was a certain element of skeptics ism on the part of some of the public and there's now I saw an article by a state university at Buffalo professor who's an operations management specialist. She's head of her whole academic society. And she proposed an idea that I thought wouldn't hurt. Very good idea. In the rare event that National Weather Service headquarters is calling a storm that's coming extreme and winter storm impact, that's the time for something akin to what happens in the military when the Pentagon tells the 82nd Airborne that this brigade is now on raised alert.

00;30;02;24 - 00;30;07;09
Don Paul
There's no general at Fort Bragg. This is I'm not going along with that. Sure.

00;30;07;15 - 00;30;08;01
Hal Needham
It's official.

00;30;08;01 - 00;30;40;10
Don Paul
Is Professor patrols is an automatic triggering of a driving ban several hours in advance of the snow where that event, in my opinion, the Buffalo police could have been out there ticketing drivers when it was still raining because the ban was in effect and the ban is enforceable by law. They do take people in less extreme events. If they can get to those people where a certain amount of the power to do or not do is remove, the flexibility needs to be reduced.

00;30;40;10 - 00;31;14;06
Don Paul
If it's a super high confidence situation, as this one was, and that even if climate change is playing a role, it's not going to happen that often. This professor proposed an automatic triggering of that extreme event in which you issue a driving ban before the snow flies. Because I'll tell you something, when that cold front passed through Buffalo at about 730 on the morning of December 23rd, sometimes it takes several hours for the lake effect to get organized, for the cold there to deepen.

00;31;14;23 - 00;31;45;17
Don Paul
The lake effect kicked in almost immediately and within a couple of hours with only a small accumulation, we were already getting white outs and people were getting lost in the storm. Then it became literally a life threatening storm, not just for pedestrians and drivers, but for the Buffalo police and the plow drivers after, you know, they did as much plowing as they could until it became impossible because the plow drivers couldn't see a thing.

00;31;45;26 - 00;31;47;03
Don Paul
When you can't plow when.

00;31;47;19 - 00;31;56;26
Hal Needham
In the worst of the worst of this, what were we looking at? I mean, what were the snowfall rates? What was the visibility? I mean, what was the worst of it? What were the wind speeds?

00;31;56;26 - 00;32;29;01
Don Paul
Well, we had a peak gust just south of Buffalo in a suburb called Lackawanna that borders on Buffalo. There's a New York state instrument in the metro net that had a peak gust of 79 miles per hour. The Buffalo National Weather Service at the airport had a peak, I believe the 73. Wow. And we were getting frequent goes to over 60 where the sustained average wind speeds were 35 to 45 and then for a couple of hours, 40 to 50.

00;32;29;01 - 00;32;45;17
Don Paul
But the airport had 13 consecutive hours of I think it was under an eighth mile visibility, but quite a few hours within those 13 hours of zero, which you never you almost never see.

00;32;45;17 - 00;32;48;24
Hal Needham
So complete whiteout and unbelievable winds. And it's the.

00;32;48;24 - 00;33;00;06
Don Paul
Longest airport outage Buffalo's ever had. The airport closed from Friday and didn't reopen until Wednesday. The next week. I've never seen that before. And I've been here, as I said, 38 years.

00;33;00;09 - 00;33;04;00
Hal Needham
How much snow did they pick up at the airport? And then what was the maximum amount?

00;33;04;08 - 00;33;39;21
Don Paul
They had the highest total. And that's not that typical either. They got 51.6 inches, I think. Wow. And but again, the other thing that happened with this storm is very often you hear, well, the temperature dropped from around 40 degrees at 6 a.m. into the single digits by evening. And if you have lighter wind speeds, the density of snow as you drop through the teens becomes lower, density blows around easily, but it should be easier to shovel.

00;33;40;05 - 00;34;14;28
Don Paul
So I was reminded by one of the lead forecasters before the storm began that there have been a couple of papers written, one in Japan in a journal that when you had truly high winds, the dendrites, those nice, pretty snowflakes, billions of them are smashing into one another on a turbulent trip and fracture and become almost columnar. They become small crystals that pack together where you have so much more snow packed into a drift than you would if the winds were gentle.

00;34;15;19 - 00;34;23;06
Hal Needham
Oh, I could. I could see like gently falling snow. You get these little air gaps right between the flakes. But when when it's that windy, they're packed more.

00;34;23;06 - 00;34;43;11
Don Paul
Yeah. When it when it finally let up I went out and we didn't have a plow service and I said, well, I'm kind of an older guy. I mean, I have to be careful, but I'm pack of. It'll take a few days. And I started to shovel and it was like shoveling water laid in snow, even though it wasn't.

00;34;43;13 - 00;34;51;15
Don Paul
Wow. Oh, it was heart attack snow. And we lost. We lost four people to heart attacks from shoveling it.

00;34;51;15 - 00;35;03;00
Hal Needham
So this almost felt like a heavy, wet snow, even though it was much colder, which for our listeners, typically when you get colder conditions, you get less moisture in the snow. Right? It tends to be dry in powder.

00;35;03;00 - 00;35;38;26
Don Paul
And the water equivalent at the airport. I, I talked to the science and operations officer there and they were saying that the ratio was about 13 to 1 for snow to liquid. We're sometimes in really cold temperatures. You get a ratio of 2025 to 1, which often happens in the Rockies, ski resorts and they had a water total water equivalent, I think of 3.4 inches at the airport observatory, which is a lot of liquid.

00;35;39;04 - 00;36;00;08
Hal Needham
Yeah, that's that's really amazing. I would not have pictured that, but that makes sense when you have these elevated wind speeds that you could pack it in more. And and like you said, it's becoming a heavier snow done. So do you think there'll be a change to the local regional response, you know, with future big snow events following the Christmas blizzard.

00;36;00;18 - 00;36;37;20
Don Paul
I do. I do think that I don't know exactly what they're going to decide. But but the criticism was widespread enough. You know, the governor was here. She held quite a few news briefings. The county executive was very aggressive, verbally warning people to stay off the roads. But the decision not to deploy many National Guard troops far in advance of the snow instead of I think there was a small number of National Guard troops who were at least had their radio stations before the storm came.

00;36;38;08 - 00;37;15;26
Don Paul
But the decision to wait to put the driving ban into effect until the blizzard warning went into effect, which was 7 a.m. that Friday morning, the 23rd, my I'm only guessing here, I think because of the amount of criticism that's been leveled, that they would probably do something more along the lines of what that University of Buffalo professor is advocating, get that driving ban out there early or you wouldn't do this for every snowstorm, but you would do it for this kind of truly extreme event because of, you know, what happens if you overrun, then sure.

00;37;15;27 - 00;37;21;24
Don Paul
And boy, who cried wolf syndrome. Oh, yeah. And there's there's even less recognition of the severity of a warning.

00;37;22;22 - 00;37;32;27
Hal Needham
Sure. That's the challenge with disaster forecasting. Right. If you go too far one way, if you over warn, then people don't believe you next time. But if you under warn, you could have fatalities with the current system.

00;37;32;27 - 00;38;11;19
Don Paul
Yeah, I see a reaction on my Facebook page because I was I've been in TV. I still substitute pretty frequently. There's a fear factor out there now instead of the I'll believe it when I see it. Sure. And although there's no sign right now of another major lake effect event in the next two weeks, which I guess could change toward the end of those two weeks, but there's no sign right now I'm getting a lot of fearful questions because people are aware, my colleagues on television are reminding people the lake is wide open.

00;38;12;13 - 00;38;37;16
Don Paul
And I've written two or three columns showing something of a pattern flip coming around the 23rd, maybe 24th of January. And I said, This doesn't mean if we turn colder that we're heading back into an extreme pattern or that there's going to be favorable wind conditions to make lake effect. But there's a certain fear factor in a lot of my followers now.

00;38;38;15 - 00;39;07;22
Don Paul
Yeah. And then there's a certain amount of denialism about how Snowy Buffalo is, because in most winters we had been getting smaller snowfalls that added up, sure. But of cities with more than a quarter million population, buffalo is the snowiest larger city in the United States. And the average year Syracuse gets more. But Syracuse population isn't as large and we even have a something.

00;39;07;22 - 00;39;23;05
Don Paul
I'm not connected with the Golden Snowball trophy between Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Binghamton and Binghamton always is at a disadvantage unless they get tremendous synoptic snow from a low pressure system because they're not near the lakes.

00;39;24;04 - 00;39;35;07
Hal Needham
Yeah, you know, I used to work at the Binghamton Airport actually loading baggage on planes when it and you'd pick up an inch or two, you know, from a lake effect event. And then up in Syracuse are getting, you know, a foot or two.

00;39;35;08 - 00;39;43;02
Don Paul
So yeah, I have a friend who's a meteorologist at a Binghamton TV station and great sense of humor. And he's always jealous. Jealous?

00;39;43;04 - 00;39;46;10
Hal Needham
Oh, yeah. Yeah. We'd always be jealous of the big snows are getting north and west of us.

00;39;46;10 - 00;39;57;06
Don Paul
It is most meteorologists that all love winter and love snow. Oh, yeah. Even though we get inconvenienced the excitement. But it gets old by the latter part of the winter.

00;39;57;14 - 00;40;06;02
Hal Needham
Yeah, you're done. So how much snow do you have at the airport right now? How does this rank? I mean, could this be the snowiest winter on record in Buffalo?

00;40;06;20 - 00;40;33;01
Don Paul
Well, we broke a record up to the date. The blizzard occurred by a wide margin. There had never been over 100 inches having fallen by Christmas. So that record is broken. But since then, we've had a trace of snow in January. Sure. At the airport there hasn't been snow on the ground for days and it looks like we may get two or three inches Friday, which will be our first actual January snow.

00;40;33;13 - 00;40;51;28
Don Paul
We got the greatest snowfall ever was in the winter of 76, 77, the year that blizzard occurred, just under 200 inches 199 point something inches. I have my it's not impossible because the lake's wide open, but I have my doubts. We're going to get up to that level.

00;40;52;06 - 00;40;55;04
Hal Needham
Where are you at right now? If you had a guess at the airport?

00;40;55;04 - 00;40;59;03
Don Paul
Well, the total is where it was after the blizzard, 101.6.

00;40;59;03 - 00;41;07;07
Hal Needham
Okay. So you got up to like you got up to basically 1 to 1.6 by Christmas. And then it sounds like really nothing in the 2 to 3 weeks after that.

00;41;07;26 - 00;41;17;06
Don Paul
Yeah. And, you know, because the lake is wide open and someone points a gun at my head and says, give me a number. I can't give you a number, but we're not done with Lake Effect.

00;41;17;12 - 00;41;36;05
Hal Needham
Yeah, they have a really broad ridge. Don, before we wrap up here, I mean, what are your thoughts on I know people talk about the polar vortex and how it changes and that can send Arctic air down to the lower 48, which obviously you're crossing over the Great Lakes. You could get some big snow where you're at. What are your thoughts on that?

00;41;36;05 - 00;41;37;23
Hal Needham
Is that something you've looked into?

00;41;38;24 - 00;42;04;03
Don Paul
Yes, But, you know, I use the cliche when I was on the PBS News Hour, I stand on the shoulders of the researchers. I explained I'm not a researcher. And I mentioned Doctor Judah Cohen, who lives outside of Boston. Sure, he's done. He's not unique, but he's done a lot of research. And another phenomenon called sudden warming, which is really esoteric, and we're not going to get into that here.

00;42;04;03 - 00;42;34;01
Don Paul
But that's something which can help to disrupt the polar vortex. And in his earlier research, he had been writing more about a big piece of the polar vortex dropping south as as a as a unit, as an entity. But now he's been showing more episodes where the polar vortex and he does relate He does have a relationship between the rapidly warming Arctic.

00;42;34;06 - 00;43;03;08
Don Paul
Sure. And for for your audience, a strong polar vortex sounds it's like, oh, that must be the really cold one. Well, that's really when the polar vortex is spinning more rapidly. It's at the stratospheric level and it's closer to the North Pole, and it tends to keep the polar air masses bottled up over the polar region. But it can be disrupted and weakened and droop and the polar out ahead of it.

00;43;03;08 - 00;43;12;11
Don Paul
The polar jetstream occasionally slows down, weakens and drops. And that's looking like what's going to happen late later in January.

00;43;12;13 - 00;43;25;14
Hal Needham
So down as a stronger polar vortex, it's tighter. It's keeping the cold air bottled up closer to the Arctic and the Poles. But a weaker polar vortex, you're getting some of these, the kind of drooping ness in the circulation and can get some of that cold air farther south.

00;43;25;22 - 00;43;54;05
Don Paul
Yeah. And for some of your Geekier listeners and viewers, Noah has some great articles written for laypeople. They don't talk down to you, but they it's not filled with equations and the polar vortex. And they had some excellent diagrams which are so straightforward where they show strong versus weak polar vortex, what the impacts are. And you can find these with any search engine, just type in no a polar vortex.

00;43;54;05 - 00;44;33;19
Don Paul
And they're great articles because the clarity, they're well-written and it's widely in fact, it's essentially no disaster disastrous, hard freeze at Texas in February 2021 was due to a polar vortex disruption. And that one hour December blizzard was a short, short lived event, was only a few days. And then we went back to above average temperatures. And I had been writing that you can we've been seeing somewhat more frequent disruptions of the polar vortex, bringing in short lived episodes.

00;44;33;27 - 00;45;08;00
Don Paul
These episodic excuse me, of extreme winter weather in an otherwise milder than average winter. And right now that's where we are. Yeah. And the Great Lakes are. That's why there's almost no ice on any of the great sure. And Dr. Judith Cohen has written about this extensively. He's also got a video he made that he had on Twitter, which I use in the Buffalo News article, because he explained it beautifully and had some good graphics to support what the polar vortex looks like when it starts to wobble.

00;45;08;00 - 00;45;26;00
Hal Needham
Yeah, Don, appreciate that. I know a lot of our listeners wonder what happened, but then they're also wondering why these things happen. And so you've given our listeners some good resources to run with. I know Noah has some great science, some great resources out there, and I'm sure listeners will will go and check out some of those graphics and some of that teaching.

00;45;26;00 - 00;45;30;18
Hal Needham
You know, it's good stuff when it's not filled with jargon and equations, but can help. I think.

00;45;30;23 - 00;45;44;14
Don Paul
Before we go, I want to I want to give your listeners a great website address if you want to learn more about climate change and you don't think you're that well-informed, it's climate got nasha dot gov.

00;45;45;24 - 00;45;47;00
Hal Needham
Thank you. So that's climate.

00;45;47;27 - 00;46;10;05
Don Paul
Remember that just do a search nature climate. It's a great website. It's updated frequently and it's got one chapter called Evidence. How do we know humans are causing most of the warming which is occurring? And it's written beautifully and it's all peer reviewed. It's not just one guy like me sitting at a keyboard.

00;46;11;05 - 00;46;27;12
Hal Needham
Don, I really appreciate you taking time to come in the podcast, hoping for a successful season up there. I know if you get any more snow, you're going to be on top of it and hopefully keeping people informed. But I, I spend much of my life in the northeastern states. I love wintertime and especially in November, December, January.

00;46;27;12 - 00;46;31;12
Hal Needham
I'd be excited. But by the time you get to late winter, I think all of us say, okay, maybe right.

00;46;31;12 - 00;46;35;19
Don Paul
Now it's been cloudy here since Christmas and some people are fed up with that.

00;46;35;21 - 00;46;46;08
Hal Needham
Character. Well, I hope the great rest of the winter, too. You hopefully stay safe up there and we'll be following your work and just appreciate all the insights and perspectives you shared with us on the podcast today.

00;46;46;26 - 00;46;51;28
Don Paul
Well, thank you all. I really enjoyed chatting with you and and your listeners. Are you still listening?

00;46;53;16 - 00;46;59;01
Hal Needham
I think they're still here. This was engaging. It was exciting and there was a lot of great content. Don, best wishes to you and we'll be in touch.

00;46;59;16 - 00;47;01;07
Don Paul
Okay, great. How?

00;47;02;21 - 00;47;21;06
Hal Needham
Well, we covered a lot of amazing content on this interview with Don Paul. I wanted to clarify a few of the points we discussed on this podcast. Number one, Don explained the science behind lake effect snow early in the broadcast. We talked about convective. So convection is a form of heat transfer that involves heat and energy moving vertically.

00;47;21;06 - 00;47;43;02
Hal Needham
Very often it drives massive thunderstorms that we see when we see like cumulus nimbus clouds, these big billowing thunderstorms on the plains in spring and summer, for example, that convection behind that whole process. So if you can recall, ever seeing big thunderstorm clouds with dark bases, but bright white billowing tops that are shaped like cauliflower, those are convective driven clouds.

00;47;43;09 - 00;48;03;00
Hal Needham
These big thunderstorms can reach 40, 50,000 feet in height or even higher. Intense lake effect snow. Squalls can also be convective. You can think of them like mini thunderstorms, but their cloud tops are a lot lower than those, say, spring and in summer thunderstorms. But they are really basically like mini thunderstorms really moving off the lake. You can think of them.

00;48;03;11 - 00;48;25;22
Hal Needham
They can produce thunder, lightning and intense precipitation. Number two, Don shared some amazing stories about how localized lake effect snow can be looking over this season's snowfall totals. I found an amazing stat I wanted to share with you. As Don shared, Buffalo has smashed their all time snowiest season through Christmas Day with 101.6 inches reported at the airport.

00;48;25;29 - 00;48;57;13
Hal Needham
So imagine if you called your friend that lives in Rochester, New York City, about 75 miles to the east of Buffalo. And you said, wow, I heard you're having an exceptionally snowy winter. She might sound really confused because through December 31st, Rochester has only recorded 9.3 inches of snow and could actually make a run at the least snowy season on record that occurred in Rochester in 1952 to 1953, when only 41.7 inches of snow fell the entire season.

00;48;57;13 - 00;49;24;01
Hal Needham
So Rochester actually could make a run at the least snowy season on record. And here Buffalo has been in international news for having two major blizzards, including the deadliest blizzard on record. So it's amazing how localized this lake effect snow can be. Number three, Don mentioned the golden snow Globe contest, which is now expanded to a nationwide competition to see which metro area with at least 100,000 people records the most snow as of January 10th.

00;49;24;01 - 00;49;45;20
Hal Needham
Buffalo is in first place by a long shot with their one one, a 1.6, providing a substantial margin over the number two city, Grand Rapids, Michigan, which right now has 68.2 inches of snow. So Buffalo still has a wide margin. Buffalo won it last season as well. And the most victories of any city in the U.S. actually goes to Syracuse, New York.

00;49;46;05 - 00;50;12;14
Hal Needham
Number four, if you're interested in keeping an eye on these Arctic outbreaks and following really the meteorology and what's coming down the pike, you can follow Don Paul on social media. He provides excellent content. His Twitter handle is at Don Paul Bits. Oh, son, that's Don Page. You'll be as in Bravo I t s as in Sierra Leone as in Sierra N and that's his Twitter handle on Facebook.

00;50;12;14 - 00;50;48;15
Hal Needham
He's facebook.com slash Don dot PayPal .90. Finally, Don mentioned some of the climatological influences on extreme Arctic outbreaks. In that conversation, he referred to the polar vortex and stated that a strong polar vortex keeps Arctic air bottled up in the Arctic. But a weaker polar vortex can lead to a weakening of the circulation in the far north, with areas of extreme cold pushing farther south, he referred to the Texas freeze of 2021 as a polar vortex event and shared that this winter has been characterized as warmer than normal in the northeastern Great Lakes.

00;50;48;19 - 00;51;10;13
Hal Needham
With a few episodes of these Arctic air blasts. He also referred to MIT researcher Judah Cohen, who does extensive research on mid to long term climate pattern prediction. Dr. Cohen will be our guest on next week's podcast. So don't miss out that interview as we continue to look in depth at Arctic weather outbreaks in the U.S. Don, thank you so much for coming on this podcast.

00;51;10;13 - 00;51;26;25
Hal Needham
We learned an awful lot from you both on meteorology, but just hearing these amazing stories of what it's been like for you to forecast lake effect snow in western New York for many decades. We at Geo Track wish you and your community a quick recovery from the Christmas week blizzard and we're excited to follow your forecast on social media.

00;51;27;05 - 00;51;48;20
Hal Needham
I'd also like to thank our amazing marketing team here at GEO Track for their excellent work in distributing our content. Our team has Zenith Baker, Ashley Anderson, Jeremiah Long, Christopher Cook, Courtney Booker and Amy Wilkins. I'm Dr. Howe. Thanks for listening. And next week we'll kind of do a part two here on these Arctic air outlet outbreaks and look at what's maybe coming for the rest of the winter.

00;51;48;23 - 00;51;54;03
Hal Needham
Thanks for listening and we'll catch you on the next episode of the Geo Trek podcast.

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