Know someone else who needs local news badly explained via email? Tell them to subscribe to the Reno Memo!
Groundhogs clearly have an East Coast bias. Punxsutawney Phil predicted an early spring on Friday … immediately before a major school-canceling snowstorm hit northwestern Nevada. The closest snowpack meter to Reno jumped from 54% of normal to 60% between Friday and Monday, Tahoe ski resorts added between 6 inches and 3 feet of new snow, and we still have more winter weather on the way this week.
Let’s be honest: Rodents don’t have any predictive knowledge about weather in general , and any specific Pennsylvania-based rodent doesn’t have any insight into Nevada’s weather, nor does he even seem to understand the process he’s involved in .
But what if we had something of more local significance to help us predict the weather — say, something that doesn’t involve annoying the wildlife or risking rabies ? We looked into the weather data since the big winter of 2004-05, seeing if cold, snowy weather was correlated with anything in particular. Here’s what we found: