Meteorologist reflects on Buffalo blizzard, response and impact
Every meteorologist in the National Weather Service has one event they work in their career that they remember.
The weather ahead of Dec. 23, 2022, was warmer, in the high 30s and low 40s with some rain. Conditions would change, and change rapidly, on the day the tragic weather event began.
For Mike Fries, the 2022 Buffalo blizzard was his second terribly memorable day at work; his first came when briefing the White House during Hurricane Katrina.
As a meteorologist, both events even beforehand “made the hair on the back of your neck stand up,” Fries said. “Because you go into them doing everything you can to make sure everyone gets information to prevent people from dying or being injured. But you know going into these events that people are going to die. And you just try to make the biggest difference that you can.”
‘It’s sort of like everything happened all at once’
In the days leading up to the blizzard, Fries and the other meteorologists at the National Weather Service in Buffalo could tell it was going to be an extraordinary storm.
“It was several, several days ahead of time that we started to get very strong indications from both the modeling systems that we use that a very large and deep system would develop over the central part of the country and sort of track through the central part of the Great Lakes,” Fries said.
“It’s sort of like everything happened all at once,” said Fries, the Weather Service in Buffalo’s warning coordination meteorologist. “Where we went from very light rain to blizzard conditions.”
A Weather Service analysis of the storm found surface temperatures dropped from the upper 30s in the morning to the teens, with windchill below zero, by noon.
Storm systems don’t typically deepen — a phrase meteorologists use for when the central pressure in a low-pressure system drops — to the degree the one in the December 2022 blizzard did. It met the definition of a bombogenesis, more commonly known as a bomb cyclone, in which a storm system intensifies rapidly due to significant drop in pressure.
The criteria required to define a bomb cyclone depends on latitude. At the latitude of New York City, the pressure in the storm must drop about 17.8 millibars in the 24-hour span, according to NOAA. At higher latitudes, the required drop is higher. A millibar is a metric unit for air pressure and equivalent to roughly .0145 pounds per square inch.
The 2022 blizzard far exceeded the minimum requirements for a bomb cyclone when passing over the Buffalo region, Fries said. That meant there was a lot of wind coming with the system, including recorded gusts as strong as 79 mph in downtown Buffalo.
‘A snow fire hose’ in Buffalo NY: Lake effect
Storms formed in the middle of the country that track into the Great Lakes typically weaken as they go, competing against another storm or low-pressure systems moving up the East Coast
“That’s generally what we see,” Fries said. “And that is not what happened in this case. This thing kept developing and deepening even as it went by us, all the way up to Quebec, basically.”
The system brought frigid cold temperatures along with the strong winds, a potent combination of factors to create ideal blizzard conditions.
The Weather Service defines a blizzard as blowing or falling snow with sustained winds or frequent gusts of 35 mph or greater and visibility reduced to a quarter mile or less lasting at least three hours.
The system moved over the unfrozen lake, with water temperatures still in the 40s, grabbing moisture and creating great instability in the cold midwestern storm.
“We got down to zero (degrees) as the system went by, and because that amount of cold air was coming over an entirely open Lake Erie, it sort of turned into, for lack of a better term, a snow firehose,” Fries said.
● Accumulations in Buffalo’s Northtowns
were in excess of 50 inches in several places; areas north of the city into Niagara County received the most snow.
● A total of 51.9 inches fell at the Weather Service station at Buffalo Niagara International Airport; North Tonawanda received 59 inches.
● The city’s Southtowns, which typically see most of the lake effect snow in the region, were spared the strongest impact as the storm flow was predominantly southwesterly.
There were nine Weather Service meteorologists who essentially lived out of the Aero Drive office during the blizzard. Fries said staff were prepared ahead of time, bringing extra food, blankets, pillows and other essentials. The office has backup generators and Erie County and the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority provided food for the meteorologists, some of whom worked 12- to 18-hour days.
Forecasters updated public statements, measured snow and communicated with decision makers at the municipal, county and state levels. Fries also did numerous interviews with local, national and international media about the storm, including media in Australia.
“I can’t even tell you how many other places, but this was not just a story that was a Buffalo concern, so to speak, because of how big and crippling of an impact it had,” he said.
What happened in the Buffalo snowstorm?
There were a lot of lessons learned from the 2022 blizzard. One such lesson was the need to be specific with decision makers on how quickly a storm will start and if people will be able to travel anywhere once it hits, Fries said.
The Weather Service in Buffalo has learned you can’t be too excited about incoming winter weather too often or people stop listening, Fries said. So, when they took extra precautions to get out the word, including webinars and additional staffing, ahead of the storm, the decision makers who work with them took note. The thresholds for those additional precautions are higher than in most places in the country, he said.
“We know the basic capability that the area has here to remove snow,” Fries said. “It’s far higher than any other urban area in the United States. Bar none. No doubt about it.”
The Weather Service doesn’t tell any municipal, state and federal agencies what to do; they simply provide them with weather information to make those decisions.
The information led to warnings ahead of the Friday storm, with Erie County warning road travel might be near impossible due to poor visibility. The City of Buffalo canceled garbage pickup and closed some parks and indoor pools. Neither the county nor the city banned road travel before the storm.
No emergency alerts were pushed out to phones warning of the dangers of driving that day.
Buffalo blizzard outages created dangerous conditions
Another lesson learned was the vulnerabilities of infrastructure like the region’s power system. While the powerful winds knocking down power lines, or knocking tree branches into power lines, was expected, the winds blowing in excess of 70 mph created a different threat to the grid.
“I hate to sound trite but there was no such thing as a snowflake at that point,” Fries said. “The wind breaks up all the snowflakes into little, tiny ice shards, basically.”
Those ice shards got through closed doors and filled interior spaces, which happened at several substations and other power infrastructure in the Buffalo area. Those unexpected power issues only worsened the expected problems from the high winds.
“We have a substantial number of people that did exactly what they were supposed to do,” Fries said. “Stayed home, didn’t try to go out and they froze to death in their own home because their power was out for too long.”
The power was out at Fries’s home for three days and he said he spoke with neighbors who heated their homes with their stoves, which they knew was a bad idea but didn’t know what else to do.
All told, the blizzard claimed 47 lives. Stranded motorists were among those who died, including Anndel Taylor, a 22year-old Buffalo resident who became stuck in the winter conditions returning from her job at a nursing center.
Is climate change making storms worse?
While climate change can be difficult to ascribe to any particular weather event, the has been an increase in extreme precipitation events, especially in the northeast U.S. As the atmosphere warms, it can change atmospheric circulations, said climatologist Jessica Spaccio, with the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Science and Northeast Regional Climate Center, in an email.
Climate change has also increased the probability and intensity of some types of extreme weather, Spaccio said. Warmer air can hold more moisture, leading to more intense precipitation events. Those extreme precipitation events are expected to occur more often and with more intensity.
The 2023 National Climate Assessment found an increase, particularly in the eastern U.S., in three measures of extreme precipitation — total precipitation, daily maximum precipitation, and annual heaviest daily precipitation amount — from 1958 to 2021.