Newsflash: It Doesn’t Snow In Philadelphia Anymore
Now, before we go any further, let’s just admit up front that we know nothing whatsoever about the actual science of weather and we hope to hell we’re wrong about all of this. But this much we know: In the six years since the wonderful, magical, joyous Blizzard of ’02, Philadelphia has suffered a weatherslide wherein we are now in what, weather-wise, used to be Virgina. Given the weather of last month or so, what would have been, in previous decades, mountains and mountains of city-crippling, fantastic, stop-everything snow has instead been just a bunch of crappy, wintry rain. Of course, there is the widely held theory that the East Coast experienced a micro-Ice Age between the years 1950 and 1985 — thereby inflating our intergenerational expectations for how much snow is our Eastern Seaboard birthright — but multiple Googlings produced no evidence of this theory whatsoever. Global warming? Maybe, but as Fake Sarah Palin once said, it might just be God’s way of hugging us closer. To which we say: Stop it, God. It’s getting creepy.
[Graphic courtesy: The Franklin Institute]
January 8th, 2009 at 11:59 am
I’m still waiting for the 6 inches that Hurricane Schwartz predicted would fall in the City in December 2008 when he gave his winter outlook in November.
January 8th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
“city-crippling, fantastic, stop-everything snow” in Philadelphia = laughable everyday flurries in the snowbelt
January 8th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
On a side note, Atlanta and New Orleans have actually seen more snow accumulation then Philly has seen (so far) this Winter.
January 8th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
Too narrow a time window to properly make sense of the pattern (but then, they say the last ice age ended abruptly, over a period of four decades). And to confuse you even further: this year the Arctic sea ice has rebounded fully, and is currently at 1979 levels. This proves nothing either way, of course, but it’s good news if you like polar bears.
Mild winters are great if you have an outdoor Venus flytrap garden, bad if you hate ticks and skeeters. Makes the pine barrens swamps impassible by foot, too. Floods the swales. Damn near died out there last winter.
January 8th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
Do realize what this means? The children of Philadelphia – for the most part – have never, in their entire lives, heard the most glorious 2 words a child can hear: Snow Day.
That makes me sad.
January 8th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
If there is one thing that will drive me from this area it’s the lack of snow. I live for winter. Snow, Ice, I love it all.If I ever get rich, I am going to follow winter around the world racking up 300 ski days a year.
January 8th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
And hey, who here remembers those grade school mornings of waking up to snow and turing on KWY and trancing out to that hypnotic background clicking waiting for your school number to come up and then going effing apeshit when you find out you have a SNOW DAY!!
Seriously, I wish anything in adulthood came as close to euphoria as that…
January 8th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
That winter of ’95-’96 was pretty awesome if you didn’t mind having your car stuck on an unplowed street for about a month. My office was closed for probably a total of seven days. Best winter ever.
While my kids would love to have snow, it’s nice to not have to shell out for all that damn snow gear in larger sizes every winter. Also? When it snows they want to go outside, which is fine, but they want me to go out with them, which is not fine.
January 8th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
Ahh, ’95-’96 was fantastic! ‘Cept I think we were in school until early-July….