A Look Back At The 2022/2023 Winter Season

Image by Kelly Ackerman

WESTERN NEW YORK – The National Weather Service in Buffalo has recently released their summary of this past Winter Season. 

Outside of two major lake effect snow events that took aim on the Buffalo, New York metro area, the winter season was overall uneventful.

The Buffalo metro area saw historic snowfall thanks to the November 17th through November 20th lake effect event and the major blizzard that occurred from December 23rd through December 27th.





The November 17-20th event featured some of the greatest snowfall amounts from a single lake effect event east of Lake Erie, with several locations totaling 5 feet or more of snow.

The December 23-27th event was the Christmas blizzard that hit the areas Northeast of the Eastern Great Lakes. The Buffalo area took the brunt of the event with crippling heavy snow that totaled near 4 feet with hurricane force wind gusts as high as 72 MPH. Other areas in the persistent snow band saw multiple feet of snow as well.

Meanwhile across the Southern Tier, snow was harder to come by. Winter storms contained more of a wintry mix of precipitation and less snow. Lake effect snow events across the Southern Tier were below what they would normally be in a typical winter season.





















In terms of temperatures, the winter months were warmer than normal. This excluded the bitter cold that the area experienced around Christmas time when most areas did not make it out of the single digits.

In addition, the mild winter allowed for very little ice formation on creeks, rivers, and Lake Erie as a whole.  Lake Erie did not completely freeze over, with the water temperature only dropping to 33 degrees during the winter. This is the 9th such time since 1927 that Lake Erie did not freeze over.

It is safe to say that if you take out the the two big Buffalo area events, the winter season would have pretty much been a quiet one that lacked snowfall and ended up being warmer than normal.









WNY News Now’s First Defense Weather team provides local weather coverage for Western New York’s Southern Tier and Northwestern Pennsylvania. Connect with us on social media using the hashtag #MyLocalWx. 

WNYNewsNow is a proud Ambassador for the NOAA Weather-Ready Nation program.

 

 

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