You may be dimly aware, by virtue of it being a major news story, that it snowed today in New York City.
You may be moderately aware, by virtue of it being a major news story, it's expected to snow in the UK.
If you live in Edmonton you probably know that today it snowed in Edmonton. Somehow I don't think folks in Texas are seeing it on the nightly news though. Hell if you live in Montreal you probably won't hear about it.
Sure, you're thinking, this is part of the same phenomenon where you don't hear on the nightly news that there's salt water in the ocean, or the Liberal government is really bad at doing their job: things that aren't rare don't make big news stories. And big snowstorms in New York are fairly rare: this is the biggest one since 2016, which itself was the biggest since 2014.
I was actually in Manhattan during that storm, by the way: and it looks to be a lot like the 2021 version: big worries about a massive storm, then a decent amount of snow falls, the city completely shuts down as they're unable to handle it, and four days later it's all melted away. From what I understand there was a 2018 storm in Toronto that went much the same way.
New York probably got more snow in this single dump than Edmonton will get in the entire year. It's a common feature of the snowstorms that hit southern Ontario: places like Toronto or Kitchener get more snow in the average season than we do, it's just that it doesn't stick. One of the harder things to get across the a southern Ontarian or American about a photograph in mid-November of Edmonton is that the exact same snow that's on the ground will still be there when they see a picture of Edmonton in early March. Even this winter, which has been overly mild, there was still snow on the ground from our November snows in mid-January before our recent temperature drop. In England this week their big concern is that the temperature will "plummet to -8C" to places like Yorkshire.
Except for January 30th, that temperature (their lowest low) is higher than Edmonton's daytime high has been since January 25th (and -6 was our "warm" exception). Toronto hasn't been below -8 for a daytime high this entire winter, and only ten days with an overnight low below that (including last night). This weekend's Edmonton overnight low is projected to be -33 and -22 for Saturday's daytime high. Call us when you get there, New York.
