Snow report / Welcome to 2017

[bungo]

Another year, another data point.

Year First snow

2016 Not till 2 Jan 2017
2015 22 November
2014 11 December
2013 Don't know, out of town
2012 1 December
2011 Not till 24 Jan 2012
2010 24 November

This snow report continues from http://bungo.livejournal.com/135261.html

Comments

[hnpcc]

2011 and 2016 stand out. Has it been much warmer?

[del_c]

I plotted them, and what stands out is 2011 (anomalously late) and 2015 (anomalously early). If you were to ignore those two data points, there would be a neatly linear trend of later snowfalls in the remaining four; but there's no reason to, except to artificially create such a trend.

If you don't ignore them, simple linear regression says there's no significant trend. It is only six data points in one location, though.

[bungo]

11, actually, but the older ones don't change the story much. http://bungo.livejournal.com/121052.html

[del_c]

It's much more impressive if you ignore 2011

[bungo]

Nice picture, thanks. A 3-dof model for 12 noisy data points.

[bungo]

I don't feel like it's been an especially warm winter so far, but my impression of the first few winters here, a decade ago, is that they were colder

[dalmeny]

Are historical records from the Müggelsee available for comparison? (Er, don't go to any effort, I just couldn't immediately see it at the link.)

I'm pretty sure I know someone who works at the IGB.

[bungo]

Yes, they were available, IIRC. The ice thickness graphs in particular were certainly there for many (>5) years - so that it was hard to read the different years' time series: they were running out of distinct colours overlaid on a black background.

That they are down now suggests to me that IGB, or their Leibnitz parent, is getting savvier (okay, maybe more paraniod) about intellectual property. Reading between the lines on that web page, I'd imagine the price of access would be co-authorship, or at least an acknowledgement in any publication. E-mail to the two people shown would be where I would start, after a search for publications.

Since they seem to be building a network of similar lake monitoring stations, there may well be an Australian lake, and/or an Australian partner agency - CSIRO?

For general climate data, I'd start with the Deutscher Wetterdienst, [www.dwd.de] - I have no idea how open they are though. For snazzy high-profile climate change indicators, you might try the Potsdam Institut für Klimaänderungen [www.pik-