East Coast Enjoys Historically Deep November While West Waits For Snow

Zach Armstrong | | Post Tag for BrainsBrains
Skier riding through powder in gladed terrain.
Winter has arrived in full force East of the Mississippi. | Image: Jay Peak Resort

For many skiers, Thanksgiving usually represents a time to get a few early season ski turns in, with ski areas in the West are typically able to open a small amount of terrain with early season snowfall or snowmaking. This year, skiers in the West have been left high and dry while the Midwest and East Coast have been absolutely pummeled with winter weather. While just a handful of ski areas West of the Mississippi have even just one run open, ski areas on the other side of the river have been rewriting record books, or at least flipping back through many decades to find a November as good as this one.

Recently, I wrote about how other slow starting seasons turned out in California, Utah, and Colorado with the help of snowfall data from snow telemetry, or snotel, sites. Unfortunately, other parts of the country do not have the detailed historical data that snotel sites give us, but, many local forecast offices of the National Weather Service keep historical records of snowfall and other weather measurements, allowing us to look back through time and see just how good this November was East of the Mississippi.

Madison, Wisconsin

Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan are having a truly incredible start this season. A huge storm dropped a foot of snow or more across the Midwest and temperatures have been absolutely frigid since then, leading to many ski areas opening far more terrain than they are typically able to in early December. There is only one year on record since about 1940 that had more snowfall in November

Madison has only had one November on record with more snow than this year. | Image: Zach Armstrong

The plot above shows that 1985 started out with a bang and stayed well above average snowfall for the rest of the winter. Note that these plots are showing monthly snowfall and not snow depths. A few of the other years that have started out close to this November’s snow total went on to produce some monster totals in January and March, but a few others lagged for the rest of the season.

Bergland, Michigan

Up north on the Upper Peninsula, deep Novembers are a little more common. This November is still more than twice the average November snowfall, but there are many more years on record with even deeper totals, showing that the UP has a really broad distribution of November snowfalls.

The UP is well above average, and previous strong Novembers have fortold fantastic season. | Image: Zach Armstrong

Here, it looks like strong Novembers are indicitive of lots more snow to come, with many of the other months logging above-average totals. It may be a great year to book at trip to Mount Bohemia. It is worth noting that a couple of the years appear to have no snowfall for December and January, despite strong starts. These values are actually missing from the records, and it is not uncommon for these datasets to be missing months or years of data.

Adirondacks, New York

The Adirondacks appear to show similar behavior to the UP. A well above-average start, but no shortage of years in the record books, with even stronger Novembers than this year. However, November seems to be less of an indicator month for New York. While some years feature huge December and January storm totals, others lag below the average for the rest of the season. Some of this variability may just come from more data being available at weather stations near the Adirondaks, where the dataset shown here dates back to 1898, but the dataset from the UP started reporting consistent monthly data in the 1940s.

The Adirondacks have highly variable snowfall in November, but an uncertain future may lay ahead. | Image: Zach Armstrong

Burlington, Vermont

Jay Peak recently reported more than 100 inches of snowfall for the season so far, breaking a 25-year-old record. While Jay Peak has a unique microclimate that leads to more consistent and deeper snowfall, the rest of Vermont and the East Coast has also been having a phenomenal start to the season.

Vermont has seen quite the start to the season, but strong Novembers do not appear correlated with above average winters. | Image: Zach Armstrong

Based on the data shown above for a handful of the best Novembers, it looks like it could be a coin flip if the following months will continue the strong start to this season. Almost all of the years shown above appeared to have below average snowfall in March, but highly variable snowfalls in December, January, and February.

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