Feel like the snow has missed you this season? It may have, but only for a handful of us in the Northeast U.S. My last update on the mid-Atlantic "snow hole" was at the end of 2010, so I wanted to see how we're doing as of the end of January. We can look at snow depth on January 31st...

But obviously snow (which melted) fell south of Maryland earlier in the season. So instead we can take a look at a snowfall total plot between Nov. 1 and Jan. 31...

But even this is hard to judge, because of course the more northern locations and mountains get more snow; look at this annual winter season snowfall map, for example.

To make any sense of this, we're going to need to look at the raw data itself, city by city, using Nov-Jan 2010-2011 Season (Accu Climo*) VS Average Thru 2002 (NCDC).

Turns out, it's really hard to find places that are running behind their normal snowfall for this time of year, especially populated areas. I looked at over 50 cities in the Northeast and the only ones that were considerably below normal (<85%) were: Roanoke, VA (79%)
State College, Pennsylvania (76%)
Grand Rapids, Michigan (67%)
Mount Washington, New Hampshire (74%)
Caribou, ME: (66%)

And most of those quickly made up most of their deficit in early January (though not Roanoke or State College). Everybody else was 88% of normal or higher. And then of course there were the big winners, at more than two and a half times their normal Nov.-Jan. snowfall:

Atlantic City, New Jersey (478%)
New York, New York (404%)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (375%)
Paducah, Kentucky (315%)
Hartford, CT (283%)
Boston, MA (278%)
Asheville, NC (266%)
Jackson, KY (253%)

So while you may not be as lucky (or unlucky, depending on your love of snow) as these folks, you guys in Washington, D.C. and Balitmore are doing fine (102% and 114% respectively), even though you were lagging for a while there. Most stations (not mentioned above) in Ohio and Pennsylvania were near normal. Most of New York state was surprisingly above normal.

The complete list is shown below. The last column gives you an idea how far through the winter you are now, compared to average snowfall - most are about halfway through. That's interesting because our latest news story says a big warm up is on the way. Of course, warmer weather normally means juicier storms, too, so it might all even out in the end (although our story says there will be no big storms in the next couple weeks). There are also some additional stats in a news story we wrote last week. That story brings up a good point about temperature, which I haven't looked at closely.

*This information is from our internal climate database and should match NWS values, or be very close. I used this because it could be quickly calculated. If something seems way off, leave me a Comment below. If you think I missed an important city under normal, let me know, but unfortunately we have to limit this investigation to cities that the NCDC has normals for (so no claims that you didn't get any snow if we don't know what your normals are).

Jesse Ferrell