As you've likely noticed, we are in the midst of a very snowy February this year, with 25.6 inches of accumulation measured so far. This makes it NYC's eighth snowiest February ever, according to the National Weather Service's records, which begin in 1868. And there may be a little more on the way!
Climate change has brought both warmer winter temperatures and more snow events to the city, and some experts believe that the increasingly warm global temperatures are disturbing the polar vortex. The polar vortex, as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration explains, "is a low pressure area—a wide expanse of swirling cold air—that is parked in polar regions. During winter, the polar vortex at the North Pole expands, sending cold air southward."
With the Arctic becoming warmer, Judah Cohen, director of seasonal forecasting at Atmospheric and Environmental Research, a weather risk assessment company, colder winters in our region may be more common. "You can think of it like a spinning top," Cohen explained in an interview with Gothamist earlier this month. "You bang on the top, it starts to wobble, it starts to meander. And where the polar vortex goes, so goes the cold air."
This hypothesis has been met with some skepticism from scientists who say we need more data to draw more firm conclusions.
In NYC, February 2010 still holds the highest snowfall record—36.9 inches—followed by 2014 (29 inches), 1934 (27.9 inches), 2006 (26.9 inches), 1994 (26.4 inches), 1926 (26.3 inches), 2003 (26.1 inches), and then 2021 (25.6 inches). But if NYC gets an inch of snow this week, we could leapfrog to the fifth snowiest February in history.
Overall, NYC has seen 38.2 inches of snow for the 2020-2021 winter so far, and there's still March and April to go!
Take a look at our updated charts and graphs of snowfall below, and if you have other ideas or data sets for us to visualize, you can email [email protected] with your suggestions and questions!
With reporting from Lydia McMullen-Laird
