In the wild world of winter weather, location is everything, which New York and Massachusetts learned well Tuesday.
Small last-minute changes in the air morphed what was supposed to be crippling feet of snow into a handful of inches in New York, leading one forecaster to apologize, the National Weather Service boss to get defensive and some Northeast residents wondering.
The not-so-great blizzard of 2015 did wallop other parts of the Northeast as predicted: Long Island and Massachusetts got hammered with more than 2 feet of snow. Auburn, Mass., got hit with 32 inches, and there was severe coastal flooding, National Weather Service Director Louis Uccellini said.
But snowfall in New York City, shut down in advance, was less than a foot.
In a conference call with reporters Tuesday, Uccellini wouldn’t say his agency’s forecast was off. Instead, he blamed the way meteorologists communicated and said the weather service needs to do a better job addressing uncertainty.
Private meteorologist Ryan Maue of Weather Bell Analytics slammed the public agency for ratcheting up forecast storm amounts before the system arrived, instead of telling people how uncertain it was.
“The public should be upset that the forecast was blown for NYC and ask for answers,” he said in an e-mail.
