Everyone, including the NWS, concedes that the forecast for NJ in last year's "blizzard" was a bust, although not a complete whiff like March 2001 was (where 1-2 feet were predicted from Philly to NYC and most locations got <1"), since 4-8" fell along I-95 and 8-12" fell east of the Parkway and within 10-15 miles of NYC. The storm was extremely well predicted from NYC eastward, including LI and most of New England.
And given that the models were all showing a foot or more of snow for everyone until a few hours before the event (for some/some models still showed the big snowstorm right up until late in the afternoon when the storm started), what would you have public safety professionals/govt. do? Just ignore the situation and hope for a bust? No, decisions to shut down need to be made at least a half day to a day in advance and it was the prudent thing to do. Having said that, the could've easily lifted the emergency by midnight, when it was crystal clear snowmageddon wasn't hitting 90% of NJ - not sure they could've cancelled the cancellation of schools/work so quickly though.
With regard to the rest of the dozen plus storms last year, you can't seriously consider grading them based on their 5-day forecasts. That's just effing stupid. 5-day forecasts are as accurate as 3-day forecasts were 25 years ago, which is to say, they're just ok, and they're certainly not going to be accurate for snowfall across a wide area - there's a reason no serious forecaster will publish a snowfall prediction more than 72 hours before the event and 48 hours is when they typically first publish forecasts.
Mostly for the reason I mentioned in this thread, i.e., almost any major snowstorm has energy coming ashore from the Pacific around 48-72 hours before the storm starts, just like this one, where the energy is coming ashore now, about 72 hours before the storms starts here (60 hours before it starts in NC/VA) and those systems aren't well sampled, data-wise, meaning "garbage in, garbage out" quite often for the models.
Personally, I think grading a snowfall forecast ~24 hours before an event starts is fair, since that gives people time to adjust plans. If you use that criterion, most of last year's events were reasonably well forecasted. I know, I have all my emails, which contain all the NWS maps from ~24 hours (and 48 hours usually) before the events. Have skimmed through them and they're pretty good (not perfect for every location though) - you'll just have to take my word for it for now, as I don't have time to put all that together, although the NWS might have "grades" on their forecasts - I'll see if I can find that.
I think we can agree that some media outlets way overhype storms and that's unfortunate. I don't think the NWS does and I don't think the good pros do - just listen to them talk about possibilities and uncertainties to know they're not overhyping.
