We had our eyes on this several days in advance, and knew something significant was coming. It took some time to nail things down, but in the end, just about everybody in Central New York ended up a winner in this, the first widespread lake effect event of the season.

It all began in the wee hours of the morning on Friday as relatively weak storm system blanketed everybody with about 1-3” of light snow. By about 4 or 5 AM, you could already see a mean lake effect band setting up from Syracuse down into Madison County. That band slowly lifted north through Utica and Rome during the morning, eventually ending up across northern Oneida County. As an Arctic cold front sagged south through the region, it took the band, energized it with thunder and lightning, and pushed it south right through Rome and Utica and into the Southern Valleys. At the same time, the lake began to really open up and flurries, squalls, and upslope snows were prevalent across the Adirondacks, Green Mountains in Vermont, Berkshires in Massachusetts and even the Poconos in Pennsylvania and Litchfield Hills in Northwestern Connecticut! For the rest of the afternoon, most of us just received a few flurries with occasional squalls. But by the evening, a more consolidated lake effect band started to set up just north of the Thruway. As the overnight wore on, it dropped south of the Thruway eventually setting up through Syracuse, along the south shore of Oneida Lake and back down through the City of Oneida and Madison County. The rest of us saw a spray of flurries and occasional squalls. The band further intensified toward daybreak Saturday directly over the City of Rome and extended into North Utica. At this point, squalls were traversing the entire Mohawk Valley all the way to Albany. Even Springfield, Massachusetts over 175 miles away, reported a half-inch from this! For the better part of the next 4-8 hours (after about 7 AM Saturday), the band basically sat over areas along and just north of the Thruway, dumping, in some instances up to 3 or 4 inches per hour! Eventually, the whole mess shifted to the north and began to weaken…very slowly. Before all was said and done, much of Central New York had picked up 1 to 2 feet… or more… of snow. Certainly not uncommon for winter, but according to many of you, very early. A VERY special thank you to all of our SkyWatchers and snow spotters for these reports!

Records set at Utica:
December 3: 11.3”, broke the old record of 3.7” set back in 1990.
December 2-3: 15.0” makes this the 6^th biggest snowstorm in December history.

December 2-3, 2005
Widespread Light Snow/Heavy Lake Effect Snow
Snow Totals