BINGHAMTON — At mid-morning Thursday, meteorologist Bryan Greenblatt had put in a long night at the National Weather Service office next to the Binghamton Airport, and it wasn't over yet.
"The day shift can't make it in," said Greenblatt, who reported for work at 11 p.m. Wednesday. He was still on the job a dozen hours later.
That's what happens when 39.9 inches of snow falls in less than 24 hours: Even the Weather Service staff can't get in.
This Buffalo-style storm was one for the Binghamton books, breaking the record for two-day winter weather, which had been 35.3 inches, recorded March 14-15, 2017.
"There's no sugarcoating it. It's a record-breaking storm," Greenblatt said. "In terms of the storm setup, it was a pretty classic nor'easter."
The big question for New Yorkers on Thursday, from Poughkeepsie to Vestal, from Port Chester to Elmira: How much did you get?
And after the shoveling is done, some may take time to consider another question: Could there be more than just winter weather at work here? Could unusual snow totals be chalked up to climate change?
Weather is measured in events; climate in patterns over time.
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The storm’s snowfall totals were high, but Greenblatt wasn't ready to read anything climate-change related into the piles of snow that prevented his relief from getting to the office on Thursday.
"We're in the winter season and this was a relatively typical nor'easter," he said. After all, he added, the Southern Tier gets strong storms.
"Usually these amounts are pretty localized where you have the heavier band of snow that kind of just pivots over the same area and just stalls,” Greenblatt said. “In this particular case, it happened to fall on a relatively highly populated area, but the overall storm itself is not necessarily unusual."
Warmer oceans, more moisture
Andrew Kruczkiewicz, a climate researcher and lecturer at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, doesn’t focus on specific storms. He takes alonger view, including asking questions and seeking answers.
" 'Is this a climate change storm or not?' is the wrong question to ask,” he said. “Every sunny day is a climate-change sunny day, because things are different now.”
There are other questions the researcher wants to investigate.
“This was an extreme snowfall for the Binghamton area and parts of the Southern Tier, but we have examples in the past 20, 30, 40 years where we saw these snowfall totals,” Kruczkiewicz said. “The questions I'm interested in are: Is the risk for 3-foot-plus snowfall increasing? And how do we describe that risk over the past 50 years versus the past 20 years versus the future 20 years and so forth?"
There is no question, he said, that a changing climate could fuel wetter storms if the conditions align.
“Climate change is warming the oceans and warming the atmosphere and when we have a warmer atmosphere, the capacity to hold moisture increases,” he explained. “Whenever we have the capacity to hold moisture increasing, the potential for heavier precipitation events also increases."
Precipitation events, such as winter storms that wallop the Southern Tier.
“These are consistent fingerprints of climate change, where we're seeing the increased risk for higher precipitation events,” Kruczkiewicz said. “But there is nodefinitive research that says we will definitely see more nor'easters or more very strong nor'easters."
Waking up to an unprecedented four feet of snow
In Endicott Thursday morning, Jennifer Woltjen was baffled when she realized she could measure the snow that fell in her yard in actual yards.
The day before, Woltjen made sure to get her six-mile run in. She had been watching the news and had a feeling that there'd be a decent amount of snow on Thursday morning— enough to make running difficult, if not impossible.
But when she felt herselfstirring at 4 a.m., she had a strange feeling that she needed to look outside. She crept out of bed and opened the door to her home’s back deck — and was met by a wall of snow.
"I was restless, and I thought, 'Oh, geez, I'm just going to go downstairs and I was just so shocked at the snow," she said. "It was unbelievable. I had to go and wake up my husband."
She traipsed around her house, collecting measurements between 46 and 48 inchesin some spots. It's more than she can ever recall seeing, including a blizzard in 1993 that brought between 30 and 40 inches of snow to her home.
"It's hard to get out there to measure, but it's a record for us," Woltjen said.
By Thursday afternoon, she hadn't even seen a snowplow come down her street. She and her husband both work from home and thankfully don't have to leave the house, she said, though she wishes the snow wasn't so deep so that she could get some cross-country skiing in.
"I love snow, but at this point there's really not much I can do," Woltjen said. "Hopefully we can get out in the next couple of days."
Managing and tracking data fora major storm
With notice that a powerful nor'easter is en route, agencies like the National Weather Service will turn to multiple sources of data to track accumulation totals during a snowstorm.
This might include information from independent observers who collect and send in data from their homes to the NWS, or it might be getting more precise measurements from a system like theNew York State Mesonet.
The Mesonet, a weather-tracking system that comprises126 stations in every county across the state, is headquartered at the State University of New York at Albany.
Modeled after similar systems in places likeOklahoma and Texas, New York's Mesonet was established in 2014 to help the state better respond to extreme weather events in real time.
Every five minutes last night, the Mesonet's various stations recorded a photo of the surrounding area to provide a visualization ofweather events in real time,said Jerry Brotzge, the Mesonet's program manager.
"(The images help) the weather service and emergency managers to monitor the system in real time — to know where it's snowing, where it's not, to get some sense of just what it looks like," Brotzge said."It's hard to describe what a picture can do for the situational awareness of a particular location."
Brotzge understands the impulse to blame a storm of this magnitude on climate change. And there is data to show that over the last 50 years, the number ofhigh-precipitation events in the northeast have increased by 75%, which is an expected result of gradual warming, he added.
But, he said, this winter has been considered a moderate La Niña year by meteorologists, meaning that cooler temperatures and more precipitation are going to be big characteristics of the season in the northern United States.
So looking at this week's storm, it is certainly historic— but really only for the narrow swath of the state between Binghamton and Albany that got those whopping snow totals, Brotzge said.
For everyone else, this ordinary nor'easter was just that: Ordinary.
"If you live in that band, it's really historic," he said. "But nor'easters are very common, and this was, in some sense, a very typical one."
PKRAMER@Lohud.com
GSILVAROLE@Gannett.com
