High Wind Events in Western New York: An Expanded Study and Development of Potential Impact Tables

High Wind Events are a common occurrence in the Great Lakes region of the United States from the late Fall through early Spring. Specifically, this study focuses on non-convective high winds brought in on westerly cold air advection by strong extratropical cyclones tracking across the region. High wind events frequently cause widespread infrastructure and property damage, with monetary values ranging from thousands to millions of dollars, along with several fatalities as documented within the Storm Events Database (National Centers for Environmental Information). This study expands upon a previous local high wind study completed by Niziol and Paone (2000) with new information and findings in several areas. In addition to using a more recent dataset of 2004-2014 cold-season events, the new study partitioned these events into three new categories to cover the full range of hazardous wind scenarios: Widespread, Limited and Advisory-only wind events. The need for the study came about through analysis of performance statistics for many of these more recent events. This study also expanded the coverage area beyond Buffalo, NY to the entire National Weather Service (NWS) Buffalo County Warning Area (CWA) along with developing new North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR) model composites of 500 hPa heights, Mean Sea Level Pressure (MSLP) and 850 hPa wind speed for each wind event category. Several high wind parameters were compared to identify distinct predictors of these categories with two standing out above the rest. The first being the strength of a surface low tracking northwest of Buffalo, NY which was also identified as a key requirement for a high wind event in the previous study and the second being strength of a strong and persistent 850 hPa jet tracking across the NWS Buffalo CWA. MSLP and 850 hPa wind data from these 2004-2014 cases were used to develop a set of High Wind Potential Impact Tables. The NARR composites and potential impact tables were created to both improve forecaster pattern recognition and increase forecaster confidence for impact extent of high wind events which should lead to improved performance statistics.