First Alert Weather In-Depth: How the snowfall stack up this season

ROCHESTER, N.Y. (WHEC) — First Alert Meteorologist Glenn Johnson is putting the Rochester area’s snowfall into historical perspective.

On average, in a given season, the Rochester area gets about 100 inches of snow.

Back in the 2015-2016 season, Rochester only got a little more than 63 inches of snowfall.

In the years after, the amount of snowfall went up dramatically.

Over the span of years, year-to-year trends show a “bell curve” for the actual statistics for snowfall, and over the last couple of years, snowfall amounts have been going down.

So why do we get this up and down scenario from year to year? Some of the variations is due to major events such as La Niña in El Niño.

Last year, we only got about 70 inches of snowfall.

So far this season, we have measured only 18.8 inches of snow, which may seem like a lot, but compared to the amount we normally get this time of year: 33 inches, it’s a different story.

So we are running about 14 inches below normal and that is the actual deficit for the seasonal snow. We know there is no doubt that we have more snow coming our way.

The last couple of snowfall events that we had this season were actually had good packing snow – it was that wet, moist kind of snowfall.

We do not think this one is going to be the same kind of variety of snow. It is going to be very dry and powdery and it is going to be much colder. That is not good news for making a snowman, but it is good news at least in terms of shoveling the snow.