We get plenty of snow here in New York, more so than not during the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.
A slow and mild start to winter has been replaced by arctic cold intrusions, repeated bouts of heavy lake-effect snow and gusty winds. Snow, so heavy that weekend in Buffalo that it fell at rates of one-to-three inches per hour.
Couple this with over 40 mph winds and you have near blizzard conditions. The lake-effect snow machine continued in bouts through this week, bringing 3 to near 7 feet of snow to Western New York with the highest totals in Erie County.
![A van buried in a snow drift in Erie on Jan. 17, 2024.](/content/dam/News/2024/01/18/Erie%2520Jan%252017.png)
That is a lot of snow in short order. Just this week, areas downwind of Lake Ontario have seen 3 to nearly 6 feet of snow in places like Jefferson County.
The wintry weather we’ve anticipated for weeks is here now and it hit as many folks were taking a long weekend to celebrate.
As we reflected and honored Martin Luther King Jr., or perhaps took a break and planned on attending the Buffalo Bills vs. Pittsburgh Steelers playoff game, our plans were interrupted in a big way by snow, wind and cold.
The game was rescheduled for Monday, which turned out to be a wonderful day for the Bills as they plowed the Steelers. Interestingly enough, the third Monday in January could very often lend itself to a very wintry scene on more than one occasion here in New York.
We know it’s the case in 2024, so far with our lake-effect snow belts in West New York and up along our Tug Hill, North Country chugging in full force. Since the holiday weekend, we’ve received several feet of snowfall, multiple storms, enhanced by repeated shots of arctic air.
Our most recent storms slammed Buffalo with not only heavy lake-effect snow, but strong, gusty winds to create whiteouts, if not blizzard conditions that prompted travel bans along and near the shores of Lake Erie.
You may be wondering why this is a big deal. After all, it is winter in the Great Northeast, right? We had a long, mild spell through December and winter was off to a very slow start.
We know it’s an El Niño pattern and mild spells were to be expected, and with the Great Lakes unfrozen, we were primed for substantial lake-effect snowfall when the cold air arrived. All areas of the state held a hefty snow deficit coming out of December, yet we didn’t have to wait more than a few weeks to make some of it up.
Our month-to-date snowfall in Buffalo is over 31 inches with 11.6 inches in Rochester, 15.6 inches in Binghamton, 13.4 inches in Syracuse and 11.4 inches in Albany. It’s not written in stone that a wintry turn of events is likely to hit every MLK week, but here are a few other storm highlights in recent memory from across the Empire State.
It was MLK week back in Jan. 2022 when a large and powerful coastal storm pivoted well inland to bring snows across the state. While this was not a lake-effect snow setup, Buffalo Airport ended up with over 17.6 inches of snow with 20 inches or more in the outskirts.
![Mid-level water vapor loop from 8 p.m. Jan 16 to 7 p.m. Jan 17, 2022.](/content/dam/News/2024/01/18/midlevel_watervapor_jan16_jan17_crop.gif)
Rochester received 10.4 inches of snow, making it their greatest MLK snow day in history. Central New York and the Southern Tier also received a range of 6 to 10 inches of the white stuff. Albany only received 4.4 inches of snow, but the surrounding hills reached snow totals as high as 14 inches.
This was because of the muted orographic effects over the Capital City of Albany as the coastal storm instead took a drastic inland track, putting the strongest storm dynamics on the far west flank of the storm track, which was within the Buffalo area. For Albany, it was back in 1994 when 10.9 inches of snow fell, making it the snowiest one on record there.
Within the past 38 years, 25 MLK days have ended up with measurable snow. In 31 of those years, both Rochester and Buffalo had snow on the ground for the MLK holiday.
While we are talking snow, let us not forget the 2022 through 2023 highly impactful lake-effect snow events that left those near Lake Erie with 164 inches of snow, and those near Lake Ontario with 202.3 inches.
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