WASHINGTON – A powerful nor’easter has pummeled the Northeast, dumping nearly three feet of snow in some areas and ranking as one of the most intense blizzards in a decade, according to meteorologists.
This storm rapidly intensified into what experts call a “bomb cyclone,” featuring rare occurrences of thundersnow and lightning. While it posed significant challenges and risks for millions along the Eastern Seaboard, weather experts were captivated by its dramatic force and stunning display.
The blizzard formed under perfect conditions, with temperatures just right for producing wet, heavy snow. Any warmer, and the precipitation would not have manifested as snow; any colder, and there would have been insufficient moisture in the air to fuel the storm, explained Owen Shieh, a warning coordination meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center in Maryland.
The storm followed an ideal path to unleash maximum snowfall. Had it veered slightly inland, it would have lost its energy derived from the warm ocean. Conversely, a trajectory further out at sea would have resulted in the heaviest snow falling over the ocean instead, noted Jeff Masters, co-founder of Weather Underground and current meteorologist at Yale Climate Connections.
“It’s always fascinating how Mother Nature manages to align all the elements to create the most extreme outcomes,” remarked private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former chief scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “This blizzard can arguably be compared to some of the most remarkable snowstorms in history.”
Finding the Snow Sweet Spot
“There’s this sweet spot that can generate your highest snow totals and that’s kind of where we’re at, so in a way that kind of adds to that classic-ness of it,” Shieh said.
At 32.8 inches (83.3 centimeters) by about midday Monday, Providence set its all-time record for snowfall, beating 1978, and it was still snowing, the National Weather Service office in Boston reported.
Islip Airport in Long Island, New York, had 26.5 inches (67.3 centimeters). Freehold, New Jersey had 24.2 inches (61.5 centimeters) and Southampton, New York, had 24 inches (61 centimeters), all before noon Monday as the snow continued to fall. New York City had more than 15 inches (38 centimeters) and counting, while Philadelphia was well over 13 inches (33 centimeters), according to preliminary weather service calculations.
And it’s the type of wet heavy snow that often triggers heart attacks, Shieh said.
“Just a word of caution for those who are going to be out shoveling the snow, that this will be easy to overexert yourself on,” Shieh said. “So take frequent breaks.”
A superbomb developing
Meteorologists measure how strong a storm gets by the atmospheric pressure at its center. The lower it goes, the stronger. This storm intensified quickly, dropping 39 millibars in 24 hours, easily passing the threshold of 24 millibars per day drop to be classified as “bombogenesis” or a “bomb cyclone,” Shieh and Maue said.
“I guess you could call it a superbomb,” Maue said.
Winter storms like this get their energy from the contrast in temperature between the cold air on land and the warm moist air over the ocean along with heat energy from the seas themselves, Masters said.
“This is about as intense as you can get,” Maue said. Its lowest pressure of 966 millibars would be a Category 2 hurricane if it were tropical, he said. He called it “a hurricane with snow.”
“It is a classic in terms of not only the snowfall rates, but the intensity of the storm itself,” said former weather service director Louis Uccellini, who wrote meteorological textbooks on winter storms, comparing it to storms in 2016 and 1961. “It was just an amazing storm system.”
A study last summer found that in a warming world, the strongest nor’easters were becoming significantly stronger.
MIT’s Judah Cohen said that a stretched polar vortex — when ultra-cold air usually penned up near the North Pole pushes further south — started just before the storm and was a factor. And he had a separate study last year finding these polar vortex stretches are increasing with a warmer Arctic.
Thundersnow and lightning
An unusual combination of winter and summer weather — thundersnow and lightning — flashed at times with this storm, thrilling meteorologists on air. That’s because “you only see it in the most intense winter storms,” Masters said.
Weather Channel extreme weather meteorologist Jim Cantore was reporting live from Plymouth, Massachusetts, when lightning struck nearby — the same place he was at 11 years ago when lightning struck during a storm he was reporting on.
“Holy smokes. We got it again baby,” Cantore screamed. “In the same place. Unbelievable.”
Meteorologist Matthew Cappucci, who grew up in Plymouth and said he yearned for thundersnow, rhapsodized about how “really cool” it was that this winter storm sparked a lightning strike to a New York City skyscraper and to wind turbines off the Massachusetts coast. Shieh said the weather service doesn’t have reports of thundersnow in New York.
Exactly what a nor’easter should look like
Meteorologists like Cappucci, Cohen and Uccellini, who love snow and extreme weather, gushed over satellite images of the storm, where they could see all the features that made this one come together perfectly.
Shieh said it looked almost too good, like something from a disaster movie.
“It almost looks like CGI (computer generated image),” he said.
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