38 ms·
Boston’s astounding month of snow a 1-in-26,315 year occurrence
- thirdtruck 12y agoAs someone raised in the south, I picked a heck of a year to move up to Massachusetts, didn't I? What do you all do to avoid going stir-crazy when the snow leaves you stuck inside the house for days?
- pyrois 12y agoFight over parking spaces. It's Boston's favorite winter pastime.
- happyscrappy 12y agoNot recommended for out of towners.
- dogecoinbase 12y agoJust go around removing space-savers, then let Boston tear itself apart.
- vacri 12y agoNever having lived in the snow, this concept was new to me. It lead me to this terrible article[1] which says the same thing in each of it's four paragraphs(!), but linked to this article[2] which has a better description of the cultural phenomenon, including some light flamewarring in the comments... [1]http://www.wbur.org/2015/02/23/space-saver-enforcement http://www.wbur.org/2015/02/23/space-saver-enforcement [2]http://www.wbur.org/2015/01/28/space-savers-boston http://www.wbur.org/2015/01/28/space-savers-boston
- Thriptic 12y agoBrowse hacker news ;p
- blisterpeanuts 12y agoGo snowshoeing or cross-country skiing. Seriously. It's the best way to adapt. One afternoon of cross-country skiing and you'll be all set; it won't even feel cold outside after that.
- imjk 12y agoEh it's not so bad. Learn to dress warm and embrace the snow. Snowboarding's one of my biggest hobbies now and I look forward to big snowstorms.
- throwawayornot 12y agohttp://www.boston.com/news/weather/2015/02/18/chillin-bostonians-build-snow-lounge-with-fire-pit/sTxr8vM5FWvewazkYJkzTK/story.html http://www.boston.com/news/weather/2015/02/18/chillin-boston...
- stephencanon 12y agoGo outside. It's fun.
- Retric 12y agoIMO, 1 in 26,315 years is a terrible way to present low odd events. 4 per 100,000 years is much better as people don't think this can't happen again in my lifetime and you don't add a lot of false accuracy. PS: Also, these are not independent events so those long tail odds are likely way off base.
- ryandvm 12y agoWho thinks they're going to live 26,000 years?
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- maxerickson 12y agoThat's exactly the intended meaning. Using 1 as the first number in the ratio makes people think of it like a comet, once you see it you won't see it again for the given period (and will not live to see another). Using 4 in 100,000 would be an attempt to get more people to reason clearly about what the odds mean.
- worklogin 12y agoRemember this is an American board; that means twenty-six thousand years.
- r00fus 12y agoOdds are very rarely described in any other terms than 1:X (i.e., only if X is a fractional number < 10).
- Retric 12y agoIt's a question of rates vs. odds. Rates like HDD failures, Diseases, Homicides, Accidents, are often described as X:100,000. Odds on the other hand apply to specific events such as the Redskins winning the next Supper Bowl. The difference is when talk about a wide range of things you speak in terms of rates. Thus, the odds of getting this much snow next year that's ~1:26,000. But, the rate of years with this much snow is better described as 4 per 100,000 years. In the end it's because they described it as events:years they should use a round number of years. But if they had said said the odds that this happens next year then 1:X should be reasonable.
- atourgates 12y agoIt's been an interesting winter. We've had more or less the opposite here in the Pacific Northwest. Many of the Cascade ski resorts are either fully or partially closed. Further inland things haven't been much better in terms of snowfall[1]. We moved into a house in Idaho this summer with a long driveway that typically has 1'-3' of snow for a month or two every winter, but I took the plow off our UTV 3 weeks ago, after only having used it once (on about 4" of snow) the entire winter. While of course climate isn't equal to weather one interesting side effect is that I've heard quite a few people say things along the lines of "Ok, I believe in global warming now." I'd imagine the reaction has been quite different in Boston. [1] http://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/ftpref/data/water/wcs/gis/maps/1stmonth/westwide/swe/WestwideSWEPercent_Feb.pdf http://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/ftpref/data/water/wcs/gis/maps/...
- squidfood 12y agoThe warm PNW and the cold NE are intimately related: http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2015/02/why-is-northwest-warm-and-california.html http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2015/02/why-is-northwest-warm-...: "It is quite easy to explain the proximate cause of the warmth over the Northwest, the drought over California, and the cold/snow over the eastern U.S. They are all caused by the same basic phenomenon: a high amplitude upper level pattern with a persistent ridge over the West Coast and a trough over the eastern U.S."
- btilly 12y agoThat article is accurate, but does not pull the pieces together. Let me fix that. We all know that hot air rises, and cold air sinks. Therefore if you heat one place and cool another, air will rise in the one, move to the other, and then sink. The Earth is heated up near the equator, and cooled near the poles, so we show that pattern. It actually repeats several times, and the result are the Hadley cells. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadley_cell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadley_cell for confirmation of this. However in the Earth there is a complication. We are rotating. When air rises, then moves towards the pole, it maintains its angular momentum, and now goes a lot faster than the ground. Thus the air that is about to come back down is going very fast. We call this the jet stream. (There are actually a few jet streams at different latitudes.) When it comes down, the ground slows it down, but it results in a prevailing wind. Over the oceans those winds are called the trade winds because sailing ships used to follow routes that used them. The one over the US goes from west to east, and that is why many major storms tend to do that. Next piece of information. The nice symmetrical structure I've drawn so far is unstable. It is prone to develop kinks and bends, which then grow. Around the world the overall average latitude is reasonably well fixed, just not the exact latitude at a specific spot. The result is that the jet stream tends to develop fairly large standing waves which are fairly long-lasting but do move around. Now go get a globe and look on it. North America turns out to be roughly half a wavelength for one of these standing waves. So if the jet stream goes north on the Pacific side, it will go south by the Atlantic. This is our current pattern and it results in a mild winter on one side of the country and a severe one on the other. If the wave is flipped in another year, the pattern reverses. Or you can have a phase shift and both coasts can be average and the interior can be either warm or cold. This has been known for decades and has nothing directly to do with global warming. (I learned it all from a fluid mechanics course that I took in 1992.)
- PhantomPhreak 12y agoOnly 21,000 years ago, Boston was buried under a sheet of ice over a kilometer thick. Source: http://xkcd.com/1225/ http://xkcd.com/1225/
- kolbe 12y agoAt least they're doing better than Finance. Those statisticians seem to encounter a 10+ sigma event a few times per year.
- kansface 12y agoI know this was a joke, but depending on the time scale, 10 sigma isn't unexpected.
- kolbe 12y agoWell, firstly, we should define what "sigma" means. Most people interpret it as it relates to the Normal Distribution. In that case, a +10 sigma event will occur with probability 4.26361e-81. Each year consists of about 3.1536e+22 femtoseconds, which are 1e-6 the length of a nanosecond, which is the smallest unit of time I've ever heard mentioned in Finance. So, even on that time scale, and with millions of derivatives and securities, I'm not seeing much possibility for a 10 sigma event.
- jkot 12y agoLast little ice age was just a few houndred years ago.
- cottonseed 12y agoI've been wondering how much snow needs to drop before we start growing glaciers.
- chiph 12y ago"Global Warming Scientists embarrassed by sign-inversion in formulas"
- rcarrigan87 12y agoI may be looking a little too much into this headline, but I really think it speaks to the way humans look at the earth as some static, immutable system. How could someone even go about calculating these odds on something so dynamic. Boston was literally under ice 20K years ago and will probably be completely under water in another 20K years.
- burkaman 12y agoThe article covers it pretty well. This is just a simulation done for fun based on current climate conditions. Right after that they acknowledge that "Of course the climate isn't static" and offer a possible explanation for the huge increase in snow. But I think the point of the article is that even taking into account recent climate changes, this is still a super unlikely string of storms, and there's a lot of chance and coincidence involved.
- SagelyGuru 12y ago"Boston’s astounding month of snow a 1-in-26,315 year occurrence" Until next year!
- grecy 12y agoI live in the Yukon, and more than once this "winter" Yukon has been the hottest place in Canada, so we're all talking more and more about climate change and how nothing is what it used to be. In the years to come, I'm expecting headlines like this (ridiculous odds about odd weather) to become perfectly normal.
- tjradcliffe 12y agoUnder-prediction of warming in the north is one of the most notable failures of climate models, although they are wrong on lots of other details as well. This is not a surprise: climate models are in important respects non-physical approximations to the real climate, and as such can't be expected to get the details right. Depending on your politics you can now accuse me either of making excuses for "the hiatus", or of being a Denialist, but all I'm really doing is pointing out that the public's expectations of climate models is both too high ("the science is settled") and too low ("global warming is a hoax!") There is a middle way between these extremes, one that acknowledges the uncertainty of the models (which are large) while at the same time recognizing that there is no physically reasonable way to double the CO2 content of the Earth's atmosphere without adding about 1 W/m2 to the heat budget. That we don't have a very good idea of how the Earth's climate will respond to that additional heating is not something we should find reassuring, and while there are plenty of good reasons for investing in nuclear, solar and other alternative power sources, there are also good reasons to invest in climate robustness: ensuring that our cities aren't entirely shut down by a rare snowfall, investing to protect the most vulnerable populations from climate variation from any source, and so on. Our economies are highly tuned up for the climate of the past 100 years, which was unusually stable. We should be aware that the kind of forward planning our parent's and grandparent's generations did based on the assumption of climate stability is not likely to be viable in future as the climate returns to its state of natural volatility, almost certainly helped along by anthropogenic contributions.
- grecy 12y ago> Our economies are highly tuned up for the climate of the past 100 years, which was unusually stable. We should be aware that the kind of forward planning our parent's and grandparent's generations did based on the assumption of climate stability is not likely to be viable in future as the climate returns to its state of natural volatility, almost certainly helped along by anthropogenic contributions. Nicely put. To be honest, when I'm having these conversations I don't go near the whole debate of global warming / we did it / co2 / etc. I think its simply important to acknowledge the climate is changing, and we need to get with the program. Why it's changing is a whole other thing for another day.
- bceagle 12y agoI have to say this past month living in Boston has been really challenging on so many levels. Tension from difficulties getting to work, playing chicken on the narrow roadways, inability to get out of the house with the kids, finding baby sitters to cover when school is cancelled and the never ending shoveling. I love Boston, but I would not be able to take many more winters like this one. If I had to narrow things down to one primary issue, though, I would have to say it is the total failure of the public transit system, the MBTA. Things wouldn't be nearly as bad if the T was running smoothly, but even now the commuter rail is running on a reduced schedule (which results in completely packed trains that are often late) and various subways trains break down on a daily basis. Not fun.
- otakucode 12y agoGiven the rarity of such an event, wouldn't the wisest course of action be to simply shut everything down for awhile? The nation of Sweden pretty much shuts down for a month every single year, I don't see why Boston couldn't handle doing it once every few thousands years.
- smackfu 12y agoThe amount of snow is only half the story. It's also been very cold, way below freezing, so the snow is just not melting. If you get a foot on Wednesday and a foot on Friday, but it melts in between, that is much easier to deal with.
- forgotAgain 12y agoI think they should have led with Boston having gotten more snow than Buffalo has ever recorded in a similar time period. Now that's remarkable!
- MengerSponge 12y agoThat's oddly specific. Why cut it off at the year? It looks like their model is accurate enough to tack on months and maybe even days to that number!