Overnight temperatures may have spared orchards in Monroe and Wayne Counties closest to Lake Ontario from a hard freeze that was forecast.

Grower Gary Herman says his thermometer recorded a low of 26 degrees in his apple-peach-apricot orchard on Lake Road in Webster. Similar readings were found in Williamson.

But orchards in Orleans County may not have fared as well. Weather stations there recorded a low of 19 degrees in Orleans County.

Herman says it usually takes a couple of days before any damage shows up in the green flower buds, which would turn brown or black if damaged. He says he's fairly confident the apple buds were not harmed. And he's hopeful about his peach trees.

Without flowers, a tree cannot bear any fruit.

Apples are a major crop in the state. New York is second only to Washington state in the production of apples.

Here is one metric provided by the National Weather Service relative to the snow drought in Rochester, which I think is symptomatic of much of the country:  In a normal winter, there are 76 days where the ground is covered be at least one inch of snow.  The record for the least amount of such days is 35.  So far this year there have been just 9 such days!  (BTW, the record for the least amount of snowfall is 11 inches which was set in the winter of 1932-33.  That record is safe.)

The other city we included in our analogue forecast for the Great Lakes was Chicago.  And there certainly has been a snow drought there, as well.  The total seasonal snowfall to date in Chicago stands at 13.9 inches.  The normal snowfall to date is 22.9 inches and by this time last year there had been 50.1 inches of snow.

The numbers in Rochester and Chicago are consistent with what our analogue forecast suggested.  So far, so good.

The cold air coming to the Midwest and Northeast over the next 10 days will come in two or three surges with a spell of modestly milder air coming after each surge. This will result from the NAO going negative (please see our first blog in December for terminology explanations) during a developing +PNA pattern. This will allow Siberian air to cross over the North Pole, rush through Canada and then enter the United States via potent arctic fronts.

The –NAO appears likely to have resulted from the stratospheric warming event that we detailed several weeks ago.  The result is going to be more typical winter conditions across the northern third of the country over the next one to two weeks, including air that is colder than normal more times than not and enhanced risks of accumulating snow.  For Rochester and the Finger Lakes this means more snow and more cold than we have seen so far this winter, not that that is saying much.