In such cases, most people use to say "never saw this" and such common
sentences.
However, really, this time this is true: it's now 30 years since I live
in the Paris area, a place where climate is not known to be a snowy
one: Paris and its region are not that far from the Channel and the
influence of Atlantic Ocean is supposedly important. And, really, I
never saw this.
For such reasons, here, winters are not really "continental" and we
often have few snow during an entire winter, if any. Indeed, during
the 200* years, we had several winters without any snow at all.
Last year was already different: we had 3 snow episodes. A quite big
one on Dec 17th (about 15cm in the western area of the region),
another in mid-January where snow lasted for about one week because of
very low temperatures (below -10 C) and a final one in February.
Still, the 2010-2011 winter is something I never saw before. In less
than one month, we had 6 different snow episodes: Nov 28th (roughly),
Dec 8th, Dec 17th, Dec 18th, Dec 20th and now Dec 22th. My area (the
western part of the region) was hardly hit with 20cm on Dec 8th and
about 15cm on Dec 20th and 22th....up to a cumulated 80cm height.
Really something unusual. And what that happens in a region where
about 12M people live, sometimes at rush hours, you can expect a giant
mess (and a giant mess it was on Dec 8th).
During these weeks, I personnally experimented my new way of
commuting: run/train/run, which means running the 3km desert country road
from my house to the train station, catching a train, then running the
final 4km in suburbs close to Paris. Both runs do actually replace a
standard bus ride. This prove to be convenient as buses are often
stopped during snow episodes (hey, there are hills in the Paris
area!).
That made things that I'll really remember for the future: this
morning's run in the country with 15cm of fresh snow, without any
single step mark (except the rabbit or wild pig ones), with the light
of my head lamp, no noise and an entirely white landscape....is
special and nearly unique when you live only 30km away from the town.
Nevertheless, that might prefigure what we will experience in the
upcoming years or dozen of years: a generally much colder winter over
western Europe, much closer to what Central Europe always
had. Personnally, I like that, but we probably need to prepare our
facilities to such events: last week-end in UK, Belgium, France,
Germany, etc. was really a giant mess (Heathrow airport closed, Roissy
nearly closed, Brussels flooded with derouted planes, Frankfurt stuck,
Eurostars stopped, gee). Is that climate change (as a consequence of
Gulf Stream vanishing) or just a collection of random events? We'll
see.