Ben Welsh

After a string of dud winters where Central Park barely got dusted, New York City is finally having a real winter.

New Yorkers are getting out their sleds, they're building snowmen, they're having to shovel off their sidewalks and clean off their cars and deal with all the hassles that come with the snow too.

But if you look at the data, this winter is really still pretty mid by historical standards.

The snowfall we've seen this year is actually below the median for what's been typical over the previous 30 years.

And many previous winters had significantly more snow.

Just to give you one data point, this January in the Mountain West States, only 400,000 kilometers of ground were covered with snow.

Now, while that might sound like a lot, the average over the previous 25 years was nearly three times higher, 1.2 million kilometers covered in snow.

That's how dry it's been.

All that said, the snowstorms we're seeing this month are significant, and they're dangerous, and they've definitely been deadly.

The snowstorms we've seen near Lake Tahoe and Northern California have resulted in eight skiers dying in an avalanche.

These are serious, significant storms, and they're bringing up what had been a very dry winter closer to something like the historic normal.