Good Afternoon,

Kind of a slow weather day right now so I figure that now is a good time to address a lot of the complaining that is taking place over the relative lack of winter weather lately. Everyone is frustrated with last winter and how this winter has started which is understandable. However this has caused several people on here to pine for the olden days when we get massive snowstorms and wintry weather all of the time. As someone who grew up in the 80's I knew this was a stretch or possibly absence making the heart grow fonder so I did some research. What I found confirmed my suspicion about winters in the Philly area.

Here is a list of every snowstorm that has brought a foot of snow to Philly (or as one poster put it - "real snowstorms") Ironically in our 130 years of tracking snowfall we have really only had 24 "real snowstorms" or roughly one every 5-6 years.

I then went a little further to get the frequency of storms by decade to see when the most big storms struck.

Clearly anyone around before the 60's would say that we are spoiled in general as we averaged one "real snowstorm" per decade through the 50's. Since then we have averaged three per decade. This includes the winters of the 70's that the older folks on here are so fond of. If you look specifically at the 70's you will see that we got 3 storms between 13 and 14 inches in a 13 month period in 1978-1979 and that was it for big snowstorms in that decade. The 1980's were dreadful. The 1990's had two amazing storms but really dreadful winters overall. Since then however we have been blessed (or cursed if you dig into the causes which I won't ) with pretty consistent winter weather. 5 of the top 11 winter storms in terms of snowfall have happened since 2003!!! That's absurdly significant from a statistical standpoint. We also had a 13 month period between 12/2009 and 1/2011 where we had 5 foot plus storms in Philly plus a 6th that brought over a foot to the suburbs. That is over 20% of the "real snowstorms" we have ever recorded in 13 months. If the cosmic price we pay for those two truly epic winters is a couple of duds we are still much luckier than any other generation of snow lovers this region has ever seen.

While we "suffer" through a down period right now please keep in mind how lucky we have been to track historic snowstorms in this area and hope that we can add to that history soon.