'Winter Misery Index' Confirms This Winter Really Is Terrible

If you live in Detroit, Chicago, or Philadelphia, and think you have had an unusually rough winter this year, there is a new quantitative "winter misery" scale to back up your hunch. According to an experimental index known as the “Accumulated Winter Season Severity Index," or AWSSI (rhymes with “bossy”), that National Weather Service meteorologists and climate experts have developed, Detroit's with a year-to-date cumulative AWSSI rank of 970 makes it “most miserable” winter on record

That figure is likely to rise further as another round of bone-chilling cold envelops the Midwest over the next 10 days, said Barbara Mayes Bousted, a meteorologist at the Weather Service’s forecast office in Omaha, Neb., and a co-developer of the index she refers to as the "winter misery index." Read more...