In Survey Of 195 US Cities, Average Winters Nine Days Shorter Compared To 1970-1997 Baseline

[patphil]

1. My wife and I live in Chester, NY.

Yeah, where the Pep Boys warehouse is a bone of contention with ICE.
But, that's not the reason for this post.
We've lived there since 1984, and have seen a dramatic change in the weather over the past 4+ decades.
My wife's an avid gardener. We used to see the first frost sometime in the 2nd half of September. Then it crept into early October, mid-October, then late October. We even had one year where the first frost was November 1st!

We also used to see over 2 months of continuous snow cover during the winter, ice fishermen on a small lake nearby, and even the Hudson River freezing over. Then we started getting winters where the ground was bare during the Christmas Holidays, and one year where there wasn't a single snow storm in January. No more fishermen willing to go out on the lake with thin or non-existing ice.

But this is the first winter in over 2 decades that we are experiencing conditions that really feel like one of those old fashioned winters. At 79 years of age I'm not ready to go back to that. The good news is that we have an excellent plow guy who does our long driveway. He even hand shoveled the end of it. I point this out because it has been increasingly hard to find a good snow plow guy with these warm winters that produce few significant snow storms.

The spring warm up hasn't been reliable from year to year. Yeah, it's a bit earlier, but a frost can still come anytime up until early May.
So, our main observation of climate change as it relates to winter is the dramatic shift of the first frost date in the fall.