r/environment • u/World-Tight • 1d ago

Buffalo remains only U.S. city in lower 48 to never hit 100 degrees

https://www.wgrz.com/article/weather/buffalo-remains-only-us-city-in-lower-48-to-never-hit-100-degrees/71-0acc83b7-85e7-4e64-9edd-0033cf7d5571
160 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

52

u/Scary_Technology 1d ago

Yet!

9

u/Riptide360 1d ago

We’ll have to add it to Trump’s Noble application. /s

25

u/Sea-Pomelo1210 1d ago

Lake effect. Lake Erie also keeps the area from getting super cold, though it does create more moisture in the air so when then temp drops below freezing it snows a lot.

There are plants that grow around Lake Erie that can't grow in central Ohio and Penn. due to the moderate temps.

9

u/deborah_az 1d ago

What's a "city"? Flagstaff and Buffalo are regularly on the lists of snowiest cities in the U.S. (Flagstaff has been at the top, and used to outrank Buffalo before long-term drought drastically dropped our averages). I'd expect Flagstaff (record high 97F) to be in this list, too. Am I missing the data source for this claim?

9

u/ifuckzombies 1d ago

For this, city = population greater than 100,000. Flagstaff has, what, 75,000?

3

u/deborah_az 1d ago

Yes. Depends on who puts the list together what cut-off they use. It's not consistent

2

u/Raznill 8h ago

Yeah that makes the headline not accurate they do specify in the body they’re only talking about cities with a population over 100k. But there’s a ton of cities with pops below that.

I’m thinking Burlington, VT falls into that group, as a city that hasn’t hit 100 but is below 100k.

1

u/deborah_az 5h ago

Oh, crap, totally missed the city size in the article... skimmed it a little too quick (note to self: RTFA again carefully when commenting!).

Other articles about cities I've seen usually (not always) seem to have a cut off at 50K (a common, generalized lower boundary defining "city"), but I could be wrong and it's my bias of noticing articles where Flagstaff shows up (I also notice Buffalo in weather articles because it's an excellent comparison when talking to others due to its infamous snows). When articles go bigger, it seems they are usually talking "major metro areas."

While, yes, the climate is warming and changing, seasons are shifting and summer is getting longer and more fierce, this is definitely a case where choosing a threshold for an article like this can be picking-and-choosing for the purpose of dramatization

1

u/Raznill 3h ago

Things get even murkier when using a term like city. Which gets defined at the state level in the US. I’d argue it’s most meaningless and they should have gone with something like metropolitan area.

5

u/RobbieRedding 1d ago

I live in the Southeast where we used to have BRUTAL Springs from the humidity, but I don’t think we’ve hit 100 more than once since Covid hit.

One thing I’ve never been able to shake is back in June 2021 when it felt like Spring here in the Southeast, but it was 115 degrees in the PNW.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m super grateful for the relief, but deeply deeply concerned for what this means.

3

u/thinkB4WeSpeak 1d ago

It has been an area marked "safer" for climate change impacts.