UPDATE: Thanks for the Comments below. A couple of notes - 1. I am aware that snow totals vary greatly across metro areas, unfortunately I need to stick to the "official" numbers from the NWS which are shown below, or the comparisons aren't fair. 2.) I forgot to repost these links to the last 6 years of snowfall in the Mid-Atlantic, courtesy the NCDC COOP Snow GIS system: 2003-2004 | 2004-2005 | 2005-2006 | 2006-2007 | 2007-2008

ORIGINAL POST: I get a lot of comments and emails from people bellyaching about not getting any snow this season. It's been "years" they tell me, or "forever." Sometimes people have a short memory for weather, and will complain about a snow season below normal even if last year's was blockbuster, but after some research I think it's fair to say that many folks in the mid-Atlantic have not seen normal snowfalls in "recent memory".

Here's what the snowfall between October 2008 and today stacked up (ignore the zero's which are missing data):

But what does this really mean compared to normal? I did a blog entry at the beginning of the month talking about the Snow Drought in the mid-Atlantic. Before the (only) snowstorm on February 1st, most of the big cities from Philly south were suffering with little to no snowfall this season. Now that the winter is officially over* I wanted to recalculate the stats. Here's what I came up with:

First, how have things changed since the end of January? Percentage-wise, the northern cities have gone down in percentages. Southerners are up, experiencing a better winter in February (mostly due to that Feb. 1st storm), while New England slowed down on the abnormally high snowfall.

Who were the winners? The big winner is Boston, with 152% of their normal snowfall, a whopping 65.6 inches dropped since November 1st. Portland, Maine is also up slightly. Beckley, Pittsburgh, and New York City ended up with only slightly-below normal averages.

Who were the losers? State College, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Richmond, VA got shafted this year, with all of those cities having less than half of their normal snowfall, except for State College (see my comments tomorrow about that).

But the big loser this winter was Roanoke, with only 19% of their normal snowfall. They only ended up with 4.4 inches this winter, compared to a normal of 22.9". And you know what's sad? If you look back 2 more seasons, the picture is no better:

Roanoke 2008-2009: 4.4" Roanoke 2007-2008: 4.9" Roanoke 2006-2007: 3.9"

In 2006, they got half of their normal seasonal snow, the winter prior a little more, but you have to look back to 2003-2004 to see a "normal" snowfall in Roanoke.

In Baltimore, it's not as bad, but you still have to go back to '05-'06 to see anything approaching normal. Similar for Richmond, who had less than an inch of snow in the prior two seasons.

*Technically the stats above are for "snow season" October - April, though "winter" ended on March 20th. I don't see any snow in these cities through the end of the month, and April snows are extremely rare - if we get one, I'll rerun them. Stats are based on AccuWeather.com Premium records (which are generally drawn from official NWS records for major cities) and the NCDC Normal Snowfall amounts. As suggested last time, Washington National is used in lieu of Dulles.

And this is not just a Snow Drought. It's a regular drought too. These areas haven't been seeing tropical rains all winter, they haven't been seeing much rain at all. Whether you look at the USGS WaterWatch map or the NWS Doppler Gauge Estimated Precip Compared to Normal (see maps below), or any of the other drought-related maps posted on the Forums thread, we're in desperate need for some rain in the Mid-Atlantic (and, in fact, for much of the East).

As noted on the Forums, it will take up to

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