So if this weekend’s storm was really the biggest, why did it not feel like it? Meteorologists and historians offered several reasons.

[...]The timing of the storm was obviously a big one. There was no rush hour to disrupt on Sunday, and the snow stopped soon enough for the plows to get in gear. The city had plenty of warning, and because the winter had been mostly a washout until then, the stockpiles of road salt were full.

Another big one was — for lack of a better phrase — the fluffy effect. Because the track of this storm was relatively far offshore, it did not pack the wallop of wet warm ocean air that northeasters can, so the snow was dry and fluffy. Very, very fluffy. Like a Persian cat in a roomful of hair dryers. Thus it blew right off tree branches rather than snapping them down onto power lines. It practically shoveled itself.

[...]Mr. Slavin hit on another mitigating aspect of this storm. There really was less snow in Elm Park. And it wasn’t just Elm Park. Borough Park, Ozone Park, Parkchester, Park Ridge, Minnewaska State Park, the Vince Lombardi Park & Ride — just about any park other than Central, the record-breaking storm actually broke no record at all.

For according to Geoff Cornish, a meteorologist at Pennsylvania State University, the heaviest snow fell in a 15-mile-wide band that passed directly over Midtown Manhattan, the southeastern Bronx and northwestern Queens. Thus La Guardia Airport in Flushing received 9 inches more snow than Kennedy, and nobody in Brooklyn saw even 20 inches, let alone two feet.

In fact, of the 17.7 million people who live in the National Weather Service district that includes Central Park, fewer than half live in counties that recorded a two-foot snowfall.

Link here.