Syracuse has no snow yet, and 76 years of records say that means nothing

Syracuse has not recorded a single measurable snowfall this season. Not one tenth of an inch, and not even a trace, through November 8.

The median date for the first measurable snow here is November 7, so the city has now passed the halfway mark of its own record with nothing on the ground.

That sounds like a story. It mostly is not.

Two seasons in five start this way

Across the 76 completed seasons since 1950, 32 of them reached November 8 with no measurable snow. That is 42.1 percent, or about two seasons in five. A snowless first week of November is close to a coin flip.

The record also holds much later starts than this. The first measurable snow arrived on December 11 in 1998, on December 1 in 1966, and on November 24 in both 2012 and 1994. Two years ago it held off until November 22.

And it does not forecast the winter

The more useful question is whether a late start means a light winter. It does not.

Seasons that reached November 8 with no snow went on to average 112.5 inches. All 76 seasons averaged 115.3 inches. The difference is 2.8 inches, or 2.4 percent, which is noise against winters that routinely swing 60 inches either side of the mean.

The range inside that group settles it. Among seasons that started this late, the lightest finished at 50.6 inches and the heaviest at 191.9 inches, which is the second snowiest winter in the entire record. The same slow start produced both.

Not even a trace

The distinction matters for anyone who thinks they have seen flakes. The National Weather Service logs any snow below a tenth of an inch as a trace, which does not start the clock. This season the station has recorded neither. Not a single day since July has produced measurable snow or a trace, which is why the season total stands at 0.0 inches rather than a fraction.

That is the honest reading of an empty column. A flurry that melted on a windshield somewhere in the county is not the same thing as a station observation, and the record only counts the latter.

What has happened

The cold has arrived on schedule even if the snow has not. The first freeze came on October 18, against a median of October 16 across the record. Five nights have since fallen to 32 degrees or below, and the coldest so far was 29 degrees on October 24.

So the season is behaving normally in temperature and merely unremarkable in snow. The useful reading for a Central New York household is that the first measurable snow is still more likely than not to arrive before Thanksgiving, and that whatever date it lands on will not tell you how much shoveling the winter holds.