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ABSTRACT
The character of a winter can be defined by many of its features, including temperature averages and extremes, snowfall totals, snow depth, and the duration between onset and cessation of winter-weather conditions. The accumulated winter season severity index incorporates these elements into one site-specific value that defines the severity of a particular winter, especially when examined in the context of climatological values for that site. Thresholds of temperature, snowfall, and snow depth are assigned points that accumulate through the defined winter season; a parallel index uses temperature and precipitation to provide a snow proxy where snow data are unavailable or unreliable. The results can be analyzed like any other meteorological parameter to examine relationships to teleconnection patterns, determine trends, and create sector-specific applications, as well as to analyze an ongoing winter or any individual winter season to place its severity in context.
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1. Introduction
How bad was this winter? Was it the worst on record? What other winters had a similar severity? Questions such as these are commonly asked of meteorologists and climatologists, but, to date, the current literature indicates a gap in the means to quantify the severity of a winter season to allow for objective comparison. Previous research has provided a means to quantify the intensity of hurricanes (Saffir-Simpson scale; Simpson 1974), tornadoes (Fujita and enhanced Fujita scales; Fujita 1971; Edwards et al. 2013), droughts (Drought Monitor; Svoboda et al. 2002), and winter storms (Zielinski 2002; Northeast snowfall impact scale; Kocin and Uccellini 2004; Cerruti and Decker 2011). The use of scaling allows comparison of event characteristics, as well as impacts that either are explicitly included as an index factor or are compared against the background of the scales that are more meteorological or measurable in nature. No such broadly applicable scaling is available for winter season severity, however. The accumulated winter season severity index (AWSSI, pronounced to rhyme with ''bossy'') was created to fill that gap.
Climatological studies of winter weather often have focused on event-specific quantities, such as individual storms. Branick (1997) utilized the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) Storm Data publication to create a national ''climatology'' of winter-weather events, including snow and freezing precipitation, to characterize the frequency, areal coverage, and seasonal behavior...