Stephen Fybish is a local weather buff and Columbia graduate of the Class of 1957 who has spent the last 25 years researching and studying the weather, especially the annual snowfall, of New York City. Spectator sat down with him to talk about his extensive knowledge and his predictions for this year's conditions.
What exactly do you do with the weather?
Well, I guess my specialty is studying the weather really all over the world in this context, especially the weather of New York City and nearby, and studying it with an emphasis on the historical side to know what happened in the past, especially since the official Central Park records got going in 1869. [I also study it] to find patterns in the past that might be helpful for making certain predictions for how the weather might be in the future, and how something that's going on now might resemble something a hundred years ago or fifty years ago and, if so, what happened after that something fifty years ago.
For instance, recently I got up to 16 minutes of fame because The [New York] Times wrote a nice article about me in which they quoted my research on snowy Decembers. This feature emphasized the fact that I had studied 24 Decembers from when the Central Park records began in 1869, 24 Decembers that got at least 10 inches of total snow. [The] first was 1872 and the most recent, except for the one we just had, was in 2000. And I found that in five out of every 6 of those Decembers, 20 out of the 24, the snow that they got for the rest of the winter at Central Park was at least 17 inches, so this sort of definitely looked like a trend.
I also took those Decembers, of which there were 30, that had had a snowstorm like the one we had on December 5 that was 6 inches deep or greater and, combining the group of Decembers with the 10 inches or more of snow with the group of Decembers that had at least one 6 inch storm, I found that the odds went up to something like 87% that there would be at least 17 inches more snow in the rest of the winter.
And of course now I'm feeling very full of myself because thanks to our nice 19.8 inches yesterday and the day before, my prediction was fulfilled just by that one storm. Up to then we had had a not very snowy January and a reasonably snowy February and then we kind of broke the bank with what we had the last couple of days. ...
Now let's get into slightly more exotic statistics. So what we have now, for instance: we only need 2 more inches of snow this month and we'll have the snowiest February--ta-da! The snowiest up to now was in 1934 when we had 27.9 inches. ... That month was also the coldest month in all the modern records.
How did you get started in this line of work?
I grew up in Jackson Heights and I went to P.S. 69, which has produced various distinguished people of which I hope I'm sort of one of them. ...
I kind of was interested in the weather--I was interested in a lot of things associated with nature, like dinosaurs and collecting butterflies and catching frogs and so forth, but when I was nine or ten I saw my first copy of the world almanac. ...
[The year] 1944 happened to have a hurricane. I think that was the most amazing weather event of my young years because in those days, of course, we didn't have all the hype and all the TV and it was war-time. It was a hurricane that came up the coast that they didn't have that much information about. [There] was a lot of rain in the middle of September 1944. ... When I went outside there were several lots with trees and things near my house and there were these great big trees lying on the ground and it really left a memorable impression on me. I don't think I've seen anything like it since. ...
I guess the other big memorable event in my younger years was what is still the heaviest and biggest of all New York snow storms, which took place the day after Christmas in 1947. At that point I was 11 years, 3 months, and 6 days old. ... I knew a lot about astronomy, I lectured about the stars of the spring sky. There was something called the Junior Astronomer's Club at the Museum of Natural History. ...
I wasn't really a huge weather buff in those days or even at Columbia. ... All of my years at Columbia were kind of low snow and there might be one cold winter month.
Is this your profession or a hobby?
I don't do it as my profession, not up to now. The only time I've ever received money directly for my great weather knowledge up to now was by writing two freelance articles for the New York Post ... one was at the end of 1977 and the other one was in the summer of 1983. ...
My main occupation had been substitute teacher in many schools. ... In general, I would probably be seen as an underachiever because when I graduated from Stuyvesant [High School] where I was fourth in the class--there's something called the New York State Scholarship exam and most of the smart high school seniors take it--I came out first in all of New York City and first south of Albany. ...
Starting about in that early part of 1977, something kind of clicked with me to really get into being a weather expert at least in New York City, and, as I say, I have a lot of information about weather around the world, and I started visiting the National Weather Service. ... I got along pretty well dropping in there and in those days you could get a lot of copies for nothing of the monthly weather records. ...
After a while I found I was beginning to compile quite a home collection of New York weather records, which eventually became a complete collection. [It] included enough stuff that I could say what were the high and low temperatures, how much it rained, and how much it snowed on every single day from the official opening of the Central Park observatory on New Year's Day 1869. ...
I became quite the expert on finding mistakes in people's articles and books, especially in the newspapers and also if they were doing it on the radio or TV. And even though I would generally communicate the fact they'd made an error in a nice way rather than, "Nah nah nah nah nah, you made a mistake," the most frequent reaction was, "Oh, crap, stop bugging me." ... The people that [The Times] consults are at Penn State; they're called the Penn State Weather Group. So the guy who wrote [an article that I found an error in], Anthony de Palma, .... said, "Well listen, I'm telling the people around [The Times]," who generally up to then despite this big profile they had written about me would say, "Thanks a lot, Steve" and not call me back, he said, "Well I'm going to tell them that the next time they write an article about the weather, even if they check with Penn State, to also check with you." So, lo and behold, I started getting more phone calls from writers of weather articles after that. ...
I had been on National Public Radio in March 2001 because they did a little profile of me on Morning Edition. ... I did my little show-off thing, I rattled off the total snow fall in Central Park from 1869-70 until then.
I hope to get on to the David Letterman show with the spring board of [The Times] article. I called up an assistant there and left a lot of stuff for him last Friday. My idea is to both play weather songs [on my violin] and he can call out like, "1966-67," and I will call out, "51.5," for inches of snow that winter. So that's my big hope.
I'm guardedly hopeful to get my big moment of media exposure. I also hope to do more lecturing about weather.
