For transplanted Minnesotans and other polar people down here: snow day protocol tips

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

I love the snow. I love the cold. I don’t know why I’m staying here now that the temperature is rising. Love winter. Love love love love love love love!

I’ve lived here all my life. I was raised on snow days and heat days (now sadly defunct since the introduction of a/c in the schools). I love having a day off for snow. I know I can’t drive in it, so I play in it instead.

But can someone PLEASE tell me why Cabarrus County closed schools two weeks ago for a HALF-INCH of snow that melted as soon as it hit the roads? I could have used the pay for that day. Insert your favorite Pit-worthy comment here.

22

Out of curiosity, where is that? And in case you know, what gets the most snow west of the Rockies? :slight_smile:

23

To provide a modicum of balance to this thread:

Okay. We get it already. You don’t know what snow is. Pardon us if our eyes glaze over while you regale us with more stories about how your town shuts down and waits it out if you wake up with a trace of frost on the grass

But you’re not in the Carolinas/Alabama anymore. You’re here. And I just want to give you a primer on how we do things in case you want to shake yourself out of your dream world and join the rest of us.

When you hear the first rumor of snow at work, you are to maintain calm and wait until there is actually an announcement that a blizzard has arrived. If the weather system is coming off the lakes, we will get more snow, and you will be notified if we are to leave early.

Ignore what you’ve heard and seen from your fellow transplant who is surfing the Internet. If a real blizzard arrives, a local person will call you over to a window to let you enjoy the beauty of the falling snow (if you can still see out that window).

If we are dismissed (or at the regular quitting time), dress warmly, but sensibly. Putting on a parka over six layers of sweaters simply means that you will be harder to pull upright after you have fallen on the slick spot (since you are now top-heavy).

Start your car, then get back out and clean the snow off the windows while the engine warms up. This exercise will keep you warm while the inside of your car reaches a temperature to keep your breath from frosting the inside of the windows. (It will also ensure that you can actually see the road and traffic that you are dodging through.) You may exchange greetings and horror stories with your fellow parking lot snow cleaners at this time, but do not whimper. They’re cold too and they do not want to be made more cold by standing idly about in the storm while you whine.

Go straight home. There is nothing worse than trying to negotiate roads crowded with people running multiple errands and blocking the snowplows.

I will skip the extraneous lesson on grocery store etiquette, since, as a neophyte, you should have paid attention to the news filler that all the local stations ran three times at the first dusting of snow in October about keeping your larder filled and having extra blankets in the car. (Batteries should not be a problem, since, these days, you have to start stocking up on them in August to get ready for Christmas.)

When the kids start out the door, remind them that they have to take their hats with them (so that they will put them back on just before returning inside while having kept them stuffed in their pockets for most of the period they were outdoors). Tell them that they cannot buy season lift tickets until they clean up their rooms. (This will prevent your ever having to invest in lift tickets.)

When your kids’ school closings are announced, draw up a list of chores that must be done before you return home (since businesses do not close for weather) and then go clear off you car and get your butt in to the office, because the rest of us really do not want to have to listen to you whine about how bad the roads are when you did not even bother venturing out on them.

When you do finally show up late at the office, do not spend an hour walking around fully dressed for the arctic, complaining about how difficult the drive was. We all drove the same roads–back before the plows and salt came through, rather than waiting for them to be cleared the way that you did. Do not, then, spend an additional several hours avoiding work by asking how any of us could live in such a horrible climate and whining about how much better your original home was where they acted as though a 1/2 inch snowfall was more to be dreaded than Armageddon (while tolerating fire ants, black widow spiders, and life-threatening temperatures from May through October).

If you insist on whining against our climate, be prepared for the inevitable. Someone will bring up the Winter of '78 and you will then be forced to listen to tales that will really chill you to the bone. Watch the eager expressions on everyone’s faces. They will be simply waiting for their chance to contribute to the ever-lengthening epic. People will will look around at each other and snicker. Even the boss will stop worrying about lost productivity. No one will miss their chance to contribute.

You want to be a hero? Shut your mouth and refrain from saying, “How can you stand it? I’m from Greenville/Charlotte/Macon/Birmingham, and we don’t get terrible snows like this” (looking at the 3/4 inch accumulation). Eyes will brighten up. Smiles will spread across faces. The boss will tell everyone to get back to work. Someone will mention Smallville for the seventh time. And your neighbors will love you for the rest of your days.

24

Good one tom :).

I notice that my area isn’t the only one with enough imports to start learning the names of their smaller towns. If I meet one more person from “Binghamton” I’m going to start looking for the subway tunnel that goes straight from there to here.

25

I don’t happen to know what gets the most snow west of the Rockies, but some little town up above Denver holds the national record for most snowfall in a single day – the town(ship) of Montague, NY came close a few years ago but didn’t succeed in breaking the record.

As for what region east of the Rockies gets the most snow, it’s the Tug Hill Plateau in upstate New York; I used to work for the state agency with responsibility for the economic and environmental wellbeing of the area. And my home town was just north of it. If you look at a map of New York – no, put that subway map away; I mean the state! :wink: – you’ll note Syracuse and Utica, with Oneida Lake roughly between them, and Watertown way up north of them. (The latter is where I’m from.) The Black River flows northwest from a point about 30 miles north of Utica, turning west at Carthage. If your map is a physical map, you’ll note that the area inland from Lake Ontario and west of the Black River is elevated – that’s the Tug Hill Plateau. If not, visualize a triangle between those three cities and pull it up on the east side, with a sharp dropoff just west of the Black River, and you have a rough idea of what it looks like.

Why it gets the most snow: Nice open Great Plains, followed by nice open Great Lakes. Winds move quite well in an eastward direction (the “prevailing westerlies”) across the Plains, and then pick up water off the Lakes. Then they start to hit upland, first Tug Hill and then the Adirondacks. What happens to cold wet air when it rises and chills? Voila – instant lake effect blizzards! What Cleveland and Buffalo get is often substantial but pales in comparison to that area’s snowfall.

26

Upstate New York. The Great Lakes provide a lot of moisture for winds sweeping south out of the Arctic and most of it is dumped on the southern and eastern shores of the Great Lakes. This provides great skiing in areas such as western New York and the top of the mitten of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. Of the Great Lakes snow belts, New York offers the “best” rise of altitude downwind (of Lake Ontario) to really capture a lot of snow. The same glacial moraines extend into northeast Ohio, but the prevailing winds do not sweep over Lake Erie as often, so that belt does not get quite as much snow. Michigan’s western shore of Lake Michigan peaks and falls too quickly to catch as much as New York and Ontario, downwind of Lake Huron, is too flat to get heavy snows throughout the winter. (I suspect that the Keewenaw peninsula in Michigan’s U.P. may give New York a run for its money, but Lake Superior may freeze often enough to reduce the moisture contributions, giving the edge to New York.)

27

Hearty agreement from someone who lived in Kingston, ON - directly across the water from Watertown.

28

You sure about upstate NY being the highest east of the rockies? Looks to me like Mt. Washington, NH is.

This page from the National Weather Service has average snowfalls through 2001. It’s in alphabetical order, but if you cut and paste it into Excel and sort on the yearly averages, here’s what you get, in average inches:

VALDEZ, AK 326.8
MT. WASHINGTON, NH 259.6
BLUE CANYON, CA 240.3
YAKUTAT, AK 196.0
MARQUETTE, MI 138.7
SAULT STE. MARIE, MI 117.4
SYRACUSE, NY 115.8
TALKEETNA, AK 115.4
CARIBOU, ME 111.7
MOUNT SHASTA, CA 104.9

I can attest that Marquette gets it’s fair share of snow. I can see it out my window. I can also say that this chart isn’t really accurate; it looks at metro areas. Munising, MI, 40 miles east of Marquette, gets WAY more snow than Marquette, but isn’t listed on the chart. Same with any city on the Keeweenaw.

29

I’m a native Minnesotan, but spent my childhood in Kentucky, where flakes in the air not sticking to the ground would call the buses and we’d all go home from school.

I don’t get the whole Southern grocery store run thing. 'Round here, everyone can live for a month from their pantry – granted its a lot of soup, rice and beans after the first week - although the freezer has half a side of beef in it. Really, the only thing you run out of is milk, and that’s why you keep the dried stuff around. Go too far South, and despite the fact that you might be trapped by floods, tornados, hurricanes, or laziness, no one can last three days without a trip to the grocery store?

30

I don’t know what part of Kentucky you lived in, but that wasn’t my experience at all. If it’s expected to get bad quickly, more rural areas will call the buses in early, yes. That’s because it’s far better to make half a day up than to get a busload of kids stuck somewhere. This is even worse in the mountains, where the roads are not only narrow, twisty, and damn near vertical in places, but also shaded, making it harder to melt stuff off once it does start to stick.

Back home, though, it was pretty common for snowflakes to melt on the roads, and then refreeze, so you got ice on the roads about the same time the snow started to stick.

BTW, the grocery store thing is usually exclusively a run on milk and bread, which most people tend to run through in a few days. It’s hard to cook a lot of stuff if you don’t have milk or bread, but it’s not really worth going back out after the roads get bad just for that. That’s why everyone tries to stock up on them before the snow hits.

31

Of course, living in Kentucky you get the best of both worlds. You can snicker at the Yankees who ask, “Is it always this hot in the summer?” when it’s April and 75 degrees with low humidity (behind their backs, of course, there’s no need to be rude). You also get to roll your eyes and shake your head at people in the deep South who freak out when it gets down in the 20’s overnight.

32

Louisville. Would have been around the mid 1970s. They would send us home before the snow started sticking. Certainly not the mountainous boonies - where it might have made sense. But perhaps someone had gotten burned by one of those 3 inches in half an hour freak snowstorms.

Then again, I also got sent home for having squeeky shoes in the hallway, so they weren’t shy at that school about sending kids home.

33

What my man Rysdad said.