CHICAGO -- One of the worst winter weather systems to ever strike Chicago generated a storm of indignation this week over just how bad it really was.
The point of contention was over where the blizzard should rank in Chicago record books. The issue became a focus of heated debate among normally cool-headed weather scientists during a post-storm conference call on Friday.
In the immediate aftermath of the storm, meteorologists concluded the storm had dumped 20.2 inches of snow on Chicago, making it the city's third-worst snowstorm on record.
But in a Friday conference call, officials with the National Weather Service announced they had recalculated and shaved 0.2 inches off the initial total; that and recalculations of other historic storms temporarily dropped the ranking of last week's storm to fourth worst, the Chicago Tribune reported.
Meteorologists from various Chicago media outlets taking part in the call bristled, telling their counterparts that such post-storm revisionism could dent public confidence in forecasts.
"People will come at us now and say, 'My God, you can't even measure the event that happened,"' WGN-TV meteorologist Tom Skilling said on the call. "It's a psychological thing. What are people going to think?"
One issue in the recalculation was deciding if lighter snow that fell Jan. 31 and Feb. 1 of was part of the same colossal storm that blasted Chicago from Feb. 1 through much of Feb. 2. The second wave of snow stranded hundreds of cars overnight on the city's marquee thoroughfare, Lake Shore Drive.
Weather service scientists decided the snow that started Jan. 31 was not part of the same storm, so deducted that snow from the total. Then amid the barrage of complaints, they quickly relented and restored the snow.
"This wasn't an effort to downgrade this storm or say that it was any less of a storm," National Weather Service's Jim Allsopp told the participants. "We thought we had it right. But after this call, I'm not sure that we did."
Not only did the weather service backtrack, it even ended up adding statistical snow to last week's storm. So by the end Friday, the storm's total was 21.2 inches -- up one inch -- firmly entrenching its place as Chicago's third-worst storm on record.
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