My experience has been that if they predict "the worst storm in history" we will get a normal amount of snow.
It's when they give us a mild "winter weather advisory" that we get the most precipitation.
Don't mean to get too Biblical here, but the Scripture does say that only God knows where the wind comes from and what it's going to do, and that's proven over and over again.
And when you factor in that the "meteorologists" are missionaries for the Church of Climate Change, you usually don't get the real picture.
They don't know.
Not all of us are! (I am a meteorologist by training—got my bachelor's about 7 years ago—but never found a job in the field.)
In reality, these things are generally pretty hard to forecast. A meteorology student devotes half a semester of it in college to learning the marks of an event; they even have an annual conference about the phenomenon where meteorologists gather and talk about the latest research. Yet considering the original forecast was for something epic, something not seen in recorded history, that should have raised serious questions about how reliable that was. There was nothing particularly out of the ordinary about this event. It wasn't moving slowly, the snow was moderate and not very heavy, and New York City always tends to get less than those further inland (since the Taconics, Berkshires, Adirondacks, Catskills and northern Appalachians can cause lift and wring more snow out of the clouds). You really have to have almost everything line up perfectly for such an event to happen in New York City, hence why they've never seen much more than two feet in a single event.
