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From the above map, you cannot see down to the scale of the snowstorm over Buffalo. But below you will be able to see just how localized the Buffalo snowburst actually was. We call the following portion of the event the "Millennium Snowburst", which occurred through 10 PM Monday night.

Yellow lines are isopleths of snowfall at 6 inch increments. The light blue rings are range rings at 10-mile increments beginning at 5 miles from the radar. The width of the 12 inch snowfall isopleth is only about 10 miles wide! Most of this snow fell in a 7-hour period of time. This is a prime example of mesoscale (or small scale) weather, common to the Great Lakes Region. We have changed the isopleths a bit to include additional reports from Depew and West Seneca, suburbs east and south of Buffalo that reported heavy snowfall amounts before 10PM Monday evening.

The map above shows the radar-derived storm total precipitation integrated from approximately 8:00 PM on Sunday, November 19th through 6:00 AM on Tuesday, November 22nd. The scale of the snow storm is almost unbelievable. The width of the storm was no more than 10 miles and the heaviest snowfall occurred across a 5 mile width over the northern half of Erie county! In other terms, the heaviest snowfall occurred across less than 10% of Erie county but nearly 80% of the population. The radar-derived precipitation maximum was 1.2 inches of water, however when the actual snowfall was converted (melted down) to water, 2.31 inches was measured at the Buffalo airport. This was really more like a wintertime equivalent of a Flash Flood!