Was 2015 Boston's worst winter yet? | Hacker News Reader

Was 2015 Boston's worst winter yet?

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99 pointsbrk43 comments

The post ends with: "It actually was a once-in-a-century winter, which is good news for Boston, because it means we probably won't see another winter like this in our lifetime."

This may or may not be true, depending on how much climate change affects our environment during our lifetime.

So very true, in the next glacial period Boston will, no doubt, continuously be under snow and ice.

I find the national media's enthusiasm for making weather (not climate change, just weather) "news" rather sad.

We have a local sports talk personality who likes to call them "weather terrorists" and makes fun of all the dire forecasts.

Like the Monday we were supposed to get a foot of snow overnight that would cripple the city, make your commute hell and warned to stay inside and not venture outside unless you absolutely had to. Not only did we only get an inch, the temp came up to a balmy 35, the sun came out and by 1pm, the new snow had already totally melted.

I like that, weather terrorists! It is shorter than radical extremist meteorologists (a play on radical extremist theologians)

Weather news is the easiest way to push climate change propaganda.

Just remember, the next Florida hurricane will prove global warming to be true!

I'm not very sure the news is the place you want anything besides "news". And weather is certainly news in that when it is extreme it is an event which often affects millions of people.

The best news stations (in my opinion) report without respect to personal belief. In that regard I respect the BBC for reporting news and not adding personal opinions, beliefs, or motives to it.

When it comes to espousing on things such as climate change I (personally) expect that I'll have to do a fair amount of research on the matter to form an opinion.

I recently read "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson. It was wonderful. In it he talks about how precarious a knife human existence sits on. The lack of ice ages in recent eras seems to be an outlier, and one of the biggest effects of climate change might be to knock us right into one. It was something I had not known and it was presented with detailed evidence as to why that may be the case. I'm not sure news organizations can or should offer these perspectives as they will either be presented in a manner which leaves a fair amount of details missing or in a manner which impedes upon the presentation of other news.

> probably won't see another winter like this

Once-in-a-century is averaged over many centuries. Sometimes things cluster.

In 2002 parts of Europe were hit by a once-in-a-century flood [1].

In 2013 pretty much the same parts were hit by a flood that in many places were worse than the 2002 flood [2]. For instance, in Passau (on Donau), the waters were the highest since 1501 [3].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_European_floods [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_European_floods [3] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/Hochwasse...

One of the least understood facets of statistics. In random or natural distributions, we do not expect any kind of evenness or predictable spacing. Clustering of seemingly random events happens and happens often.

Only when averaged over a sufficient number of samples can we make sense of patterns.

Say you have an apparently independent random process and you sample a hundred or so values from it. From those, you could get an estimate of the population statistics, the mean, deviation, skew, and such. Now, on the n+1th observation, you wind up with something at 5 sigma.

If the population is correctly characterized by the first hundred observations, then that data point is highly unlikely and not likely to be repeated.

If the population is not independent, or is in the process of changing, then it's possible that the population statistics are invalid.

Indeed. It's hard to avoid noticing that in the "10 worst" table, 8 of them came after the '78 season. I wonder what the L-score histogram looks like with data only through '78; did the '78 event also look like a 100-year storm?

probably did. just using the figures in the chart, it would be:

* 1978: 7.1

* 1948: 5.6

* others.....

Looks like an outlier to me.

and you could go back to 1888 for a great blizzard, or even before then. The issue before us is that we don't have great records for an extended period of time for areas like North America. Get over to Europe and the Far East and we likely could come up with some historical accounting.

The take away is this, severe weather, is easy to exaggerate the causes because so much of it is still unknown. The part I appreciate about the faux panic over climate change is that each day seems to bring about more understanding of what is happening and why.

Chicago had its worst 'once in 100 year' winter last year and this year also broke more than a handful of records both in snowfall and temperature. From what I can tell, the jetstream that usually blocks off Arctic air has weakened, thus raising the chances of cold air blowing on the midwest. We may be in a completely new winter pattern now. Or it may be a fluke, who knows, but its not safe to assume regular variability anymore. So far climate change has been blamed by some for the new higher frequency of this pattern. They may be right.

Gambler's Fallacy

That chance of a 1-in-a-x_amount_of_time event happening does not change right after it happens, at least in a strictly statistical since. Baring any actual physical factors, likelihood of such an event is the same every day.

That chance of a 1-in-a-x_amount_of_time event happening does not change right after it happens

It would if it was based on bad or previous thinking and models. I think that's what the point was. We may need to throw out our old models, and if that happens this could be a lot more common.

Or how much technology changes our lifetimes during our lifetime.

Snowfall aside, I think most New Englanders will still relate to 1978 as a more severe winter given the number of fatalities.

"Most New Englanders" were born after 1974 so they don't remember the winter of 1978 at all :)

source: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=average+age+in+new+engl...

I remember 1978. God I feel old now.

The Blizzard of 78 caught people almost totally by surprise. It also had some of the same snow accumulation from multiple storms issue that this year had.

For years, just about everyone at least knew a friend of a friend who got stuck on Route 128 and had to be evacuated or got stuck at their office for multiple days. As a result, people in the Boston area were really paranoid about heading home if there was a storm coming. Some I know said to me once that they had never seen any northern city where people were so anxious to get going when it started snowing.

(I was in Cambridge in 78 but at school with no car so it was pretty much just a memorable and fun experience.)

That explains a lot. I've always wondered why such an otherwise industrious and hard working people will head home or stay at home at the first sign of a snow flake, even amongst people born long after 78. Cultural memory in effect I guess.

> I was in Cambridge in 78 but at school with no car so it was pretty much just a memorable and fun experience

All I remember were the igloos everywhere in the streets of Cambridge(port), lit by candles it was a wonderland...one of my earliest memories.

Have been away for a long time, but talking to older family about '78 they say it was a party since the city shutdown for a week, no work, just have fun ;-), whereas the current winter has been more of an ongoing slog with storm after storm.

Keep in mind that the techniques used to measure snowfall have changed over time. Modern measurements are inflated as compared to older ones.

https://www2.ucar.edu/atmosnews/perspective/14009/snowfall-m...

Anyone can handle the bottom 90% of snow storms that they see. I am fine with Boston having trouble this year just like I am not surprised when things close for a few days in North Carolina for 6" of snow. Even mighty Watertown NY had trouble a few times when I lived there, and those people are good at dealing with it.

I guess saying "the worst in the history of the city" is less impressive for American cities, since they have not existed for very long... :)

At least we still do better than in the xkcd "Ice Sheets" comic (http://xkcd.com/1225/).

Boston long predates reliable meteorological recordkeeping, though, which is what counts here.

If another ice age like that comes early, we'd better hope we really know how to kick anthropogenic global warming into high gear.

Yeah, an ice age would be far worse than anything predicted for AGW.

Really puts humans in perspective. That said, it's nice to know we're all part of a potential Atlantis.

Is there a place I can look up the L-score for an arbitrary winter in an arbitrary city?

Does this take in account global warming?

How would one do that?

"What the massive snowfall in Boston tells us about global warming"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/201...

“Sea surface temperatures off the coast of New England right now are at record levels, 11.5C (21F) warmer than normal in some locations,” says Penn State climate researcher Michael Mann. “There is [a] direct relationship between the surface warmth of the ocean and the amount of moisture in the air. What that means is that this storm will be feeding off these very warm seas, producing very large amounts of snow as spiraling winds of the storm squeeze that moisture out of the air, cool, it, and deposit it as snow inland.”

This link seems to imply that the record snowfall was caused by global warming. That wasn't the question. The question was, how could the writer of TFA have changed his analysis of snowfall records to "account" in some fashion for global warming? E.g., should old, theoretically pre-warming, records be scaled down, or scaled up, or is there some other adjustment to be made?

Nobody knows. The climate is intensely non-linear, and as such can only be predicted by models that are comparable in complexity to those for turbulent flow.

This is not to say that anthropogenic climate change is not real--there is plenty of evidence for it--but that climate models in their current state, and in almost any plausible state to come, are not up to the task of addressing these sorts of relatively short-term variations.

Even saying things that are probably true, like "Climate change will result in more extreme weather events because the heat engine of the climate will have more power behind it and it is being progressively pushed out of the mid-20th-century near-equilibrium" doesn't tell us anything about specific <em>types</em> of climate events. Maybe it'll result in more and heavier snowfall. Maybe it'll result in more severe hurricanes. A hundred years from now we'll have the data to look at the distributions so we can tell. Today, we are largely in the dark.

Someone here quoted Michael Mann saying that high sea-surface temperatures were responsible for more moisture in the air resulting in higher snowfall. Well and good, but if New England experienced a series of unusually dry winters we'd be pointing to high sea-surface temperatures changing wind patterns resulting in drier air over the region, and so on. Almost any weather event is capable of a nice linear-sounding "explanation", but weather prediction is still terrible, which tells you how seriously those "explanations" should be taken.

One thing's for certain, we're going to live in interesting time (the bad kind). A prediction a few decades ago was that if the Gulf Stream stopped, European weather would look much more like America's.

Latitude-wise, Boston is about halfway between Rome and Florence, very slightly south of Dubrovnik (which is used as the sets for Game of Thrones' King's Landing and Qarth), Liverpool is a dead ringer for Edmonton.

The real problem was not having any melting so it just kept piling up. Two way streets become one way and must be negotiated in situ, can't see around corners etc.

Yes, it's the amount of snow outstripping the capacity to remove it that always makes the news. Lots of places regularly get far more snow than Boston:

http://www.nohrsc.noaa.gov/snowfall/data/201503/snfl_2014093...

( http://www.nohrsc.noaa.gov/snowfall/ gives access to a date picker and totals over shorter periods of time)

You're not kidding. I (oddly) graph the temp daily, and feb had about 3 days where it broke freezing.

A fun city game: car or just snow mound?

The public transit didn't work, compounding the problem. My three mile commute turned into 1.5 hr nightmare.

Finally Massachusetts is having a conversation about public transit. Fingers crossed they'll fix it. Maybe in time for the Olympics!

I moved to the Boston area from Minneapolis... I miss the warmer, less snowy weather.

So many mirrors knocked off. Even if you turned your mirror in, you had a chance of a total sideswipe. Not fun.

Considering that records only go back a few hundred years, all a headline like this does is sell digital newsprint. It is absolutely useless and has nothing to do with the hoax of global warming. It is a data point with little meaning and only slight newsworthyness.

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