February 14, 2006
Snowstorm II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:00 AM EST I am not sure when or exactly where my colleague on this blog, Frederic Schwarz, did his inspection tour of Sunday’s snowstorm in which he saw no more than a foot of the stuff, but I doubt that the National Weather Service was hyping the recorded snowfall. So what could account for the discrepancy between the official statistic and his observations? I’ve been fifty miles north of New York City since the storm hit, but we certainly got two feet up here. I know. I had to shovel a good deal of it (and a heartfelt hat-tip to my friend, neighbor, and fuel-dealer Bobby Daros, whose truck and plow and strong back saved me from having to shovel a good deal more—I now have a mountain of snow outside my office window that might be there until April). I was immediately struck Sunday morning—after I first comprehended just how much of it there was—with how extraordinarily light it was. It was pure powder and very easy to shovel as a consequence. My front walk was a gorge, with two-foot sides, down to the street in no time. But powder snow compacts quickly, and by the time the storm ended, late in the afternoon, the walls of the gorge, despite additional snow fall, were noticeably lower. Today, they are no more than a foot high. Also, the city is an enormous heat sink. Unless the buildings and sidewalks were already below freezing, a good deal of the snow would have melted as it fell. Also I suspect that, because the snow fell so fast, it quickly built up a layer on the sidewalks that insulated the sidewalks from the cold air above, allowing the sidewalks to continue to melt snow from beneath. Finally, the official New York City weather statistics are gathered at Belvedere Castle in the middle of Central Park, not in the streets and avenues. The ground there would have quickly cooled to below freezing if it started out above it. And the wide-open spaces of Central Park—at least wide-open by New York City standards—would have minimized the drifting that would have piled up much snow in the lees of buildings and in cul-de-sacs and enclosed backyards, anywhere that was protected from the wind, keeping it off the streets. I think this is a good example of why Benjamin Disraeli said that mendacity came in three forms: lies, damned lies, and statistics. The last can be both accurate and highly misleading at the same time.
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