Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton said the forecasters who predicted two feet of snow in his town got it wrong.
With meteorologists predicting the latest storm would bring 15 to 30 inches of snow across Connecticut, cities and towns prepared for the worst. But the latest storm brought a mixed bag.
Eastern Connecticut was clobbered, while western parts of the state were not hit nearly as hard as expected.
Speaking on WNPR’s Where We Live, Mayor Mark Boughton said the forecasters who predicted two feet of snow in Danbury got it wrong, and that means that people may not believe him when the next storm heads our way.
"The danger is the next time I go back on the radio and say we’re going to have two feet of snow," Boughton said, "people are going to laugh and say, yeah, right. And we may really get two feet of snow."
Snow totals at Danbury Municipal Airport were a mere four inches.
Bougton also said Danbury was overstaffed for the storm. "It does cause a problem," he said, "plus the overtime expenses of bringing everybody in. Typically for a storm like this, we don’t let people go home, because a lot of times they can’t get back in to work if it's going to be the way they said it was going to be. But we kept our crew in for 24 hours because we kept getting this, 'well, it's coming, it's coming.'"
Stephanie Dunten, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service, called the science of forecasting "fluid dynamics."
"It's trying to determine how the physics is going to evolve within the atmosphere," Dunton said. "We look at so much guidance -- maybe five or six different types of models -- and we try to determine what is going to occur."
Sometimes those models can be wrong.
NBC Connecticut meteorologist Ryan Hanrahan said that in this case, the storm with its narrow band of very heavy snow tracked farther east than expected.
"A storm like this just shows you how we have gotten a lot better," Hanrahan said. "But we're far from perfect. We can see these storms coming from several days away. We know it's going to be a big storm, but when it comes to trying to figure out where you’re going to get this band of snow, that’s the kind of stuff that’s really hard to do before the storm hits."
Hanrahan said that sometimes the hardest part of forecasting is communicating its uncertainty.
