SE Michigan winters milder than Central New York

The following was submitted by The View staff reporter Jerry Vaute:

There is winter, and then there is winter.

My wife Jan and I just returned from a brief trip to central New York State to visit our families, in a Christmas tradition that goes back over three decades now, and I was reminded of the wintry weather conditions that I left behind many years ago.

Back in 1977, when I was interviewing for the job that I eventually landed with Ford. I was curious about living conditions here, if ultimately I came to live in this area.

About all that I was acutely aware of was the moniker “Murder City” attached at the time to the city of Detroit.

Murder City. What would that mean to my family and me?

Fortunately, the threat of mayhem visited upon me in the Detroit Metropolitan area never materialized, and I‘ve been glad and grateful for that. But I recall also asking cab drivers at the time about the weather in this area, and I had a tougher time figuring that out.

I figured that, with the proximity of the Great Lakes, the snowfall and the temperatures would be a problem.

Ultimately, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect as I accepted the offer from Ford, but I’ve learned that weather conditions in this area, although they can be bad at times, are on average much better than in central New York.

The sun often doesn’t shine in the city of Syracuse, where I was born and raised.

I recall that my mother used to work in an office building in downtown Syracuse. She told me a story once about a summer day working in the office, when the sun came out from behind a cloud. It was such a noteworthy event, she said, that the office workers rose from their desks to enjoy the view of the sunlight, it being a rare event in Syracuse.

Years ago, I recall reading that Syracuse had the highest average snowfall of any Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area in the United States, almost 110 inches each season. A SMSA has a metropolitan area with at least 250,000 people.

The total was higher than that of the city of Buffalo, which has earned a reputation in the media as having sometimes-horrific snowfalls. Syracuse was worse.

At another point while I still lived in New York, I read that the U.S. military moved its winter operations from a site in Alaska to New York State, to better replicate the tough conditions of winter.

This winter, the official snowfall in the city of Syracuse is 70 inches, so far, through December.
In the city of Oswego, where my in-laws live, I suspect it’s much higher, because Oswego is at the southeastern edge of Lake Ontario, and often receives in excess of 200 inches of snow each year.

Much of it is “lake effect” snow, frozen moisture picked up from the lake by the chill westerly wind, carried over the lake and deposited on communities like Oswego.

The temperature was bitterly cold in the CNY area after Christmas. The temperature dropped as low as the teens, and winds gusted close to 30 miles per hour. Even longtime natives bundled up and complained.

I miss my ancestral family. And I still miss central New York State in many ways, for many reasons, after all these years.

But I’ve found many things to like about where I live in Belleville, and among them, believe it or not, is the winter weather.

After my recent visit to central New York, I was reminded that it could be worse – much worse.