It isn’t as easy as you think. Older people here in Massachusetts and New Hampshire have been saying the same thing to me for a couple of years. It is kind of like an old person version of a meme judging by the frequency that it comes up.
However, the data isn’t there and I have wondered the same thing. Everything I have looked at shows that there wasn’t nearly as many VERY LARGE snowstorms back then as there are today. Most of the biggest recorded ones have occurred in the last twenty years with a very few scattered big ones spread out of over decades and a fairly big one in the 1800’s.
It is really a two part question:
Did really big snowstorms happen in New England during the 1950’s and 60’s - the almanac answer to that is generally 'No" according to today’s standards.
Why do so many people recall that they did? - I don’t have a good answer for that. My best guess was that snow removal equipment and vehicles were inferior to today so that people got snowbound a lot more even with lesser amounts of snow. Some people are claiming that isn’t true either but but I can’t see how it wouldn’t be.
I was able to drive to drive 30 miles to work at the height of the most recent gigantic storm. It wasn’t fun but I averaged 45 miles an hour. The snowplows were out and I have a modern SUV with 4wd and traction control. Don’t try the same thing in a '69 Impala or an old school Lincoln Continental because you won’t make it. I counted 14 wrecks on my way to work and they were all older cars.
This was what I was going to say. I believe that there was a run of colder than normal winters in the 1960s. So there was “snow on snow on snow” as the old Christmas carol says.
And looking at the Midwest one I remember how we were all afraid our skin would freeze off. The snow was deep and my dad was stuck at work for a week, but the wind chill was the worst: “Wind chill values reached −60 °F (−51 °C) across much of Ohio” Definitely no school.
Wow. Two of them.
I guess I didn’t know because we were too busy digging ourselves out to worry about what was going on out East.
Now I wonder about those “I survived the Blizzard of '78” t-shirts my folks bought—which one were those actually made for…
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I was actually being ironic, I’m well aware of both how difficult it can be to find weather records, like the annual snow totals for each city, and for each state, and for the northeast US. It’s actually ridiculous that you, or I, can’t call this up with ease.
My father was born in Fall River in 1948. Other than a government-sponsored trip to southeast Asia in the late 1960’s/early 70’s, he has lived in or just outside of, Fall River his whole life. My mother was a transplant to just outside of Fall River in the mid 1960’s. I’ve lived just outside of Fall River all of my life, as well.
I asked my father about the 1950’s and 1960’s snow, he said that there is no difference between now and then. Some years it snowed, some it didn’t, and in the same quantities as now. My mother agreed. Both said that the Blizzard of '78 stands out as the only oh-boy snow event. The storms may have seemed worse because of the cars they had, but really there wasn’t any more snow than now. My father used the “how much [he] shoveled” metric - no more than he does now.
He did say, however, that the winters seemed colder through the late 50’s and 60’s. He cites the Taunton River and Mount Hope Bay freezing solid enough that people drove their cars from Fall River to Somerset over the ice. I recall Mount Hope and Narragansett Bays freezing all the way across in the 1980’s and again in the early 2000’s, to the point that the Coast Guard broke a channel to the power plants in Somerset so the coal ships could come in. The ice wasn’t nearly solid enough to drive across, though. Maybe the hot water discharge from the power plant into Mt Hope Bay (starting around 1967) kept it ice free since then.
The snow year around here was the winter of 1995-1996. Over 100 inches through the season, which is still the official record. I was the only one of my group of friends that had a four wheel drive vehicle, I did a lot of driving that year. Super high snow banks at intersections were a pain that season, too. I’m seeing them coming back this year, but it looks like the towns have been knocking them down. What a wonderful modern age we live in.
Anecdotal, but fairly reliable first-hand testimony.
It’s hard to tell exactly which bar is which year. But that graph indicates that for a period of 17 years in the 50s and 60s there were no years with less than 30 inches and only two years with less than 40 inches. The latter part of the graph (which only goes to 1998) shows some high snowfall winters, but many with snow falls below 30 inches and several with snowfall below 20 inches. So I’d say it’s easy to see why people think snowfall is worse now than it’s been recently and was worse in the 50s and 60s than recent memory, but might be similar now to then.
Indeed – that Boston snowfall graph does show a marked contrast between the period 1955-1970 and 1970-1990, which squares with my memory of growing up in the area… in the 70s and 80s, we started getting these El Nino winters, which were, at the time, a new phenomenon to me. It’s not that we had massive blizzards in the 60s, but rather, that there was a significant amount of snow on the ground for pretty much the whole winter (often starting before Christmas), as opposed to scattered snowfalls that melted quickly… midwinter thaws went from being unusual events to being the norm.
This is a harder thing to verify, and I don’t have the time nor the inclination to do it, but looking at one month (January) historically, it doesn’t seem to be the case. Average temps, as well as highs and lows, were pretty consistent (obviously there are outliers) from 1950 through the 1990’s. Starting around 2002, it became warmer in a statistically significant way.
Weather is a funny thing. If there is one thing that people on the SDMB consistently are mistaken about, it is weather. I’ve read people’s stories about being in cold weather that is 10 to 20 degrees colder than the lowest temperature ever recorded anywhere in the state they were in. I’ve seen anecdotes about downhill skiing in -50°F temps. Even if that was windchill (though it was claimed to be ambient temp) a ski slope would be be shut down. The lift operators would be in danger for their lives, and frostbite would be epidemic.
Total snowfall is but ground accumulation is more something you would have to find a pack/melt hydrologist for. It was something we were/are aware of because of how many of us are still farmers.
And again, I’m PA and less affected by the ocean and stuff. So YMMV.
You can get a trend line here by selecting Precipitation, 3-month, March (will show Jan thru March), and choose your state. THen under Options choose “Display trend”, then click Plot.
p.s. – In Mass. the trend is going slightly up since 1900. And if you select end-month February the trend is greater.
And yet it is one of the most important and well documented things in the modern world. You would think something like the snow records for Boston would be a few clicks away. Instead you might be surprised to discover snow is no longer even measured by the NWS for Boston.
Born in Minnesota, raised mostly around Chicago, always happy to laugh at the babies in NYC, but I can say one thing: You guys in New England are having a really shitty winter and my gloating this year is over how much BETTER it is here.