Ice Storm Map: Did AccuWeather Miss the Forecast?

UPDATE: Please see the Comment below from My Buddy Scott's Blog [JessePedia] about this excellent map pinpointing the location of the ice!

The question came up yesterday in a Comment on my blog: Did AccuWeather miss forecasting this Ice storm? (Up to an inch of freezing rain fell, knocking power out to over 1 million customers; you can read more about the power outages on my blog from yesterday; below are some more photos from our Photo Gallery users, and further down the page are some more incredible Associated Press photos).

To answer this question, I've attempted to map the ice storm (because the government reporting system has no way to do this) by coloring in counties where Spotter Reports came in talking about "Freezing Rain" or "Ice Storm".

On the map above, red means Yes and orange means Probably (there were hundreds of reports and I may have missed those counties, or there may have not been enough population there to report it). The size of the area affected, especially in Maine, could be exaggerated by this map in areas where counties are larger.

Now here's our official forecast issued on Thursday morning, one day before the Ice Storm hit:

One problem with this map is that it's not clear whether we thought the ice would be restricted to the red area, or whether we thought areas to the northwest would get both ice and snow. If the latter was the case, we shouldn't have let snow override ice on the map. If not, then we did indeed miss forecasting the icing that occurred in most of northwestern New England. Although the core of the ice forecast shown there did happen, clearly we also missed the south and eastern extent of the ice (we implied there would be no icing in New Jersey, Connecticut, northeast PA, or eastern Massachusetts).

Altogether, I'd say our map did not include a large enough area of ice, and as a result, some people were unprepared. With this map, we couldn't have foreseen 1 million power outages. To this I say: Forecasting isn't perfect, but I'm sure our forecasters did their best with the information they had. Given the lack of media hype before the ice storm, it seems that we were not alone.

The other, perhaps more important issue is whether the government (NOAA's NWS is responsible for issuing official warnings and advisories, which we redisplay on AccuWeather.com) issued proper warnings. The map below shows advisories in effect as of Thursday morning:

Note that the purple "Ice Storm Warning (ISW)" only covers a tiny portion of the area affected. According to their definition:

So at quick glance, it looks like they missed the boat. But it's not that easy. The area in question was covered by pink "Winter Storm Warnings (WSW)" at the time, which can also be issued...

I suspect that the WSW is issued especially in cases of mixed precipitation (snow and ice), which you couldn't do in a ISW area because there was only ice there. So, you'd have to read through each WSW to find out whether they contained the proper predictions of ice, and that's not something I have time to do. Even if they did warn correctly, since you can't see it on a map, the media may not have realized what disaster was hidden in that data.

By the way, below is a list of the highest amounts that I could find (over half an inch, there were too many to list at or below that reading). Even less than a 10th of an inch of ice can cause travel nightmares, and over a quarter of an inch can bring down trees, so some of these amounts are pretty impressive, but nowhere near the record freezing rain amounts that I have talked about before, which range from 4 to 11 inches. A more complete list available here also includes a list of the counties shown above, city names which were frequently mentioned in AP Photos, the Raw News Videos at right, and on our Photo Gallery.

AMOUNTS OVER 0.50":

Peru, MA: 1.00" High Point State, NJ: 1.00" Calais, ME: 1.00" Ellsworth, ME: 1.00" Schenectady, NY: 0.88" Colonie, NY: 0.80" Highland Lakes, NJ: 0.75" Vernon, NJ: 0.75" Piscataquis, ME: 0.75" Topsfield, ME: 0.75" Feura Bush, NY: 0.75" Hancock, ME: 0.75" Guilford, ME: 0.75" Tobyhanna, PA: 0.75" Sedwick, ME: 0.75" Middleburgh, NY: 0.75" Richmondville, NY: 0.75" Woodford, VT: 0.75" Tobyhanna, PA: 0.75" Carmel, ME: 0.60" Savoy, MA: 0.60" Dover, ME: 0.60" Albany, NY: 0.60" Clifton Park, NY: 0.60" Carmel Bridge,ME: 0.60" Round Lake, NY: 0.60" Springfield, VT: 0.60"

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