Snowiest Big City in the World

[nystate]

http://www.syracuse.com/kirst/index...79309123670.xml

Monday, March 14, 2005
SEAN KIRST
POST-STANDARD COLUMNIST
Bill Hibbert accepted the truth many years ago. Even as a boy growing up in Liverpool, Hibbert realized most places didn't get as much snow as his hometown. At 11 or 12, he began researching the snowfall in Onondaga County, and he found almanacs with snowfall totals from other countries, and that led Hibbert to a monumental conclusion:

Syracuse was the snowiest big city in the world.

More than 30 years later, nothing's happened to make him change his mind.

"There may be snowier places in the Rockies and the Cascades and such," said Hibbert, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Buffalo. "But overall, for cities with populations of 100,000 or more, I think Syracuse is it."

In the last month, in a big way, we've demonstrated again why we deserve that title. For much of the winter, Rochester led in the race for the Golden Snowball, an award given out annually to the mayor of the snowiest big Upstate city.

Since then, Syracuse has left the competition in a cloud of powder. As of 5 p.m. Sunday, Syracuse had 132.3 inches of total snowfall for the season, compared with 109.0 for Rochester and 96.0 for Buffalo. More impressive is the way in which that total's been achieved: From Feb. 8 through March 13, Hibbert said, Syracuse recorded only two days without any snow at all.

"Slow and steady wins the race," he said, "and that's a lot of days with continuous snow."

Both Hibbert and Peter Chaston, an accomplished meteorologist, researcher and author in Kansas City, Mo., say that Syracuse gets the most snow of any big city on the planet. Chaston should know. Before moving west, he worked for years in Rochester, where he won a measure of fame for inventing the Golden Snowball.

That trophy is on display in the office of Syracuse Mayor Matt Driscoll, where it will almost certainly remain for at least another winter. Sunday, when Chaston did an interview from his Missouri home, he said he's been playing around with some ideas for a Golden Snowball theme song that could be used every year during the trophy ceremony.


He also acknowledged that plenty of small towns or rural areas - in the Tug Hill Plateau, or in Michigan or in Colorado - get far more snow than any big Upstate city.

Yet Chaston was so intrigued by the way big cities around the world handle large amounts of snow that he decided to do a global survey. He reviewed major metropolitan areas in such places as Russia, Canada and Iceland, as well as the United States, including Alaska.

"I triedto do it meticulously," he said. "Basically, I was looking at the largest amount of people affected by the greatest amount of snow, and Syracuse comes out way on top, with Buffalo in second place."

To Chaston, that is a cause for celebration. He remembers getting calls from cranky public officials in Rochester after he introduced the Golden Snowball in the 1970s. The callers maintained he was hurting Upstate New York by making a media show of how much snow we receive each year.

Chaston laughs off those objections as silly. No one who visits this region is going to be fooled about the snow, Chaston said, and he contends that Syracuse in particular should be willing to do something fun with it.

"If I lived in Syracuse, I'd build a big snowflake on the interstate - kind of like the arch in St. Louis - and I'd have it be the entrance to the city," he said. "Cars would have to drive underneath it, and it could say, 'Welcome to the Snowiest Big City in the World.'

"At the end of the snow season, I'd have a snow day, a Golden Snowball Appreciation Day, and I'd have a snow prince and a snow princess, and an annual snow parade, with snowflake bands and a lot of snow songs, including the Golden Snowball theme that's about to be written."

On that note, this might be a good time for returning to Hibbert, who offers this extended forecast for this month: "March has been very cold, and it doesn't look like much of a break for another week to 10 days," he said, a period in which he guesses that Syracuse might pick up an additional 7 to 10 inches of snow.

At that point, Hibbert said, "a very cold low-pressure system across eastern Canada should break down and retreat to the north." That would leave us with warmer temperatures roughly a week or so before the end of March, and it would mean that we could actually begin thinking of the spring. . . .

One sweet notion in the snowiest big city in the world.