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Winds of winter expected for February

WBFO file photo

If this winter has seemed windy, the National Weather Service says you're right - and there's more to come.

Wind is always a touchy subject around here in winter, since it can bring lake effect snow. If that snow does come, the wind can bring the horizontal kind of white stuff that blows into faces and windshields.

Winter brings stronger winds than summer and we have been seeing some of that. The weather forecast is for more winds, as a winter front approaches and will continue into February. National Weather Service Meteorologist David Thomas says February is looking more like a typical winter month than the mild ones we've been experiencing so far.

"The lake is still open," Thomas says. "Typically, it is frozen by the end of January, but the mild January has maintained the open waters on the lake and still available for producing lake effect snow here for the next blast of arctic air."

As for the winds, for the month of December, winds averaged 13.2  miles per hour, he says.

"December was one of the windier months that we have had here in Buffalo in the last 10 years," Thomas says. "The reason was - actually several reasons - one was we had several areas of colder air that dropped across the Great Lakes that really picked up the southwest wind direction and we've had several cold fronts that come through."

He says not only did the winds come in as harbingers of a storm, they stayed around afterwards to keep the air moving.

Mike Desmond is one of Western New York’s most experienced reporters, having spent nearly a half-century covering the region for newspapers, television stations and public radio. He has been with WBFO and its predecessor, WNED-AM, since 1988. As a reporter for WBFO, he has covered literally thousands of stories involving education, science, business, the environment and many other issues. Mike has been a long-time theater reviewer for a variety of publications and was formerly a part-time reporter for The New York Times.
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