Up until this weekend, this winter has been a different one than many western New Yorkers are used to.

"It’s been unusually warm across the Northeast," said Samantha Borisoff, climatologist for Noah’s Northeast Regional Climate Center at Cornell University.

One of the reasons why — a long term climate trend.

"Climate change is always there in the background kind of helping us and push us toward these temperatures, these warmer than normal temperatures and helping us achieve some of these records that we’ve been seeing across the northeast," Borisoff said.

On top of that we have shorter term modes of climate variability, one of the most well known terms known as 'El Niño.'

"El Niño is a warming of the equatorial seasurface temperatures in the pacific in a certain spot for an extended period of time and what it does is it shifts global weather patterns," said Borisoff.

Right now we are experiencing an unusually strong El Niño, which in the United States tends to bring a more active storm track.

"El Niño globally is kind of helping drive some warmer than normal temperatures as well," she explained.

With this warmer winter being seen across the Northeast of the country.

"We analyze about 35 major climate sites in the northeast, and our northeast region covers West Virginia to Maine. So out of those 35 sites, 13 had their warmest year on record in 2023," said Borisoff.

Making it important to get ahead of the storm.

"Certainly with the storm we experienced this week for customers to take stock of their plans for emergencies and start to refresh those going forward in the event that there’s another storm," said Alexis Arnold, head of communications for RG&E.

RG&E and NYSEG has a life support equipment program for customers with specialized needs that customers need to enroll in in advance.

"Customers enrolled in this program, they receive communications, they’ll get automated calls ahead of a storm and then in the event that there is a storm and there are outages, they receive live check in calls during those events," Arnold said.

Always better to be safe than sorry when it comes to the weather.