Thousands were without power in our area following Monday's storm.

As of 7:00pm, RG&E had 237 customers remain without power and NYSEG had just over 1,000 customers without power.

RG&E says power should be restored by 10:00pm Monday.

Meteorological winter ended at midnight last night.  (Astronomical winter has about three weeks left.  And, of course, Mother Nature cares little for how we define winter with accumulating snow falling here as late as May.)  

Certainly no one should ever mistake the winter of 2011-12 as a harsh season in Rochester and the Finger Lakes.

And no one is likely to mistake this past February as a harsh month either.

But February was snowy.  In fact, it was by far the snowiest month of the season.  It was even snowier than the months of November, December and January combined.

The total Rochester snowfall for February was 27.3 inches which was 5.8 inches above normal.  And since 1980, there were only 11 February’s
when more snow fell.

By the way, while the winter nationally was unusually warm and relatively storm free, that was not the case elsewhere in the northern Hemisphere.  

Here is one metric provided by the National Weather Service relative to the snow drought in Rochester, which I think is symptomatic of much of the country:  In a normal winter, there are 76 days where the ground is covered be at least one inch of snow.  The record for the least amount of such days is 35.  So far this year there have been just 9 such days!  (BTW, the record for the least amount of snowfall is 11 inches which was set in the winter of 1932-33.  That record is safe.)

The other city we included in our analogue forecast for the Great Lakes was Chicago.  And there certainly has been a snow drought there, as well.  The total seasonal snowfall to date in Chicago stands at 13.9 inches.  The normal snowfall to date is 22.9 inches and by this time last year there had been 50.1 inches of snow.

The numbers in Rochester and Chicago are consistent with what our analogue forecast suggested.  So far, so good.