Our project focuses on snowfall trends and how they compare. Specifically, we looked at New York City and New Jersey, areas that we knew differed in environment, one being urban and the other more rural/suburban leaning. We used snowfall trends to analyze what might be the greater cause of changing temperatures in each area: the overall effects of climate change, or possible warming from an industrialized metropolitan area. We narrowed our areas down to JFK, a centralized airport in Queens, NY, and Toms River, a small town in Ocean County, NJ.
Our hypothesis was that by examining the snowfall trends of each location across 40 years, we might be able to see if one was more impacted by the change in climate than the other. Given that, we could also examine the air pollution of each location to see how much bearing that had on the temperature and level of snowfall, and be able to come to a conclusion of whether being urbanized had significantly affected the level of snowfall in that area.
In both cases, the snowfall trends acted more similarly to AQI trends than they did to temperature trends, indicating that snowfall may be more closely correlated with urbanization than with climate change. It is worth noting, however, that contrary to our expectations, it snowed more overall in JFK than in Toms River.
