“But sometimes when it’s still snowing in April or May, I just want it to end.” Blades of glory “I like the snow, now that I am warm and do not freeze,” she says. Like many international students, Amoako soon learned that what she’d earmarked as winter gear was really only appropriate for fall luckily, friends helped her shop for everything she needs to stay toasty.
What struck me the most was that it did not produce any sound. I saw these white flurries coming down from the sky and they were everywhere. I am used to rain, and rain makes a lot of sound, so it was very strange to me.” “I saw these white flurries coming down from the sky and they were everywhere. “The first time I saw snow was one afternoon freshman year, on my way back from the Ag Quad,” recalls Amoako, who promptly called her siblings and tried to give them a sense of what she was experiencing via video chat. Just ask Lordina Amoako ’23, a Hotelie who hails from Ghana. Given that Cornell draws students from all over the world-including much warmer climes-the snow and chilly temperatures that strike toward the end of fall semester can come as a bit of a shock to some. “But if it’s snowing during the day and we’re trying to plow while there are students on campus, you can imagine how slow we have to go.” “If it stops snowing at two o’clock in the morning, and we can get ahead of the students and traffic, everything is golden,” Schied says. And, as always with weather, timing is everything. These days, grounds staff are metering out salt more precisely, with the aim of using less they’re also testing other compounds to pre-treat/anti-ice walkways and roads. At 30 ☏, for example, a pound of salt can melt 46 pounds of ice-but at 10 ☏, it can barely melt five pounds, and takes more than 10 times longer to do so. It’s not a straightforward task: as the mercury drops, road salt gets dramatically less effective. Over the course of a typical winter, says grounds director Dan Schied, staff distribute more than 2,500 tons of salt on roads and pathways. Read on for a flash-frozen sampler of some of Cornell’s winter-related lore, stats, tips, memories, and more.Įach time it snows or ices up, the University’s grounds crew tackles the clearing of some 15 miles of roads, 61 miles of sidewalks and walkways, and 114 acres of parking lots. “If I had to put my chips anywhere, I’d place my bets with them.” “ The Climate Prediction Center has us looking at higher chances for above average temperatures, with near-average precipitation for December, January, February, and March,” he says. is in for a “season of shivers”-and Upstate New York is in for very cold temperatures, though perhaps drier conditions than usual.Īnd as for Montreuil? He tends to avoid making broad predictions-and notes that dire weather warnings are sometimes inflated to garner headlines and page views. What’s the forecast for winter 2021–22? According to publications like the Old Farmer’s Almanac, the U.S.
“But they also keep us a lot warmer than we would be otherwise.” Sans the Great Lakes, he says, our weather “would be a lot more like Minnesota.” “In the winter, they give us a lot of snow, and they make it really cloudy all the time,” Montreuil says. The five huge freshwater bodies-spanning more than 750 miles from west to east, with Lake Ontario only about 70 miles north of Ithaca-have an outsized effect on the region’s climate. “And we’ve got the Great Lakes on top of that,” Montreuil adds. The largest ones-like Cayuga-are deep enough that they almost never completely freeze over in the winter. One factor is the hills and valleys of the Finger Lakes, as well as the lakes themselves. So what makes Ithaca’s weather so … particular? Obviously, that can have a big impact on people, road crews, commuters, and just getting around and staying safe.” One of the biggest quirks, he says, “is the lake effect, and how one minute it can be sunny out, and then you fast forward five minutes, and you can’t see across the street. “But from a forecasting point of view, it can be a pain.” “One of the most unique-and, from my point of view, the coolest-things about Cornell and Ithaca when it comes to the weather is how vastly different it can be from downtown to campus and up in the hills,” says Montreuil, a Tompkins County native who holds a master’s in earth and atmospheric sciences and runs the popular Finger Lakes Weather site. Depending on your perspective, this can be seen as a challenge, a game of chance-or, if you’re meteorologist Drew Montreuil, MS ’15, a scientific delight.