For Northeast blizzard, everything was just right to roll up a monster snowfall

WASHINGTON (AP) — The nor’easter hitting much of the Northeast with nearly 3 feet of snow in places is as classic and powerful a blizzard as it gets, the strongest in a decade and the most intense in history, meteorologists said.

The Northeast quickly intensified to easily qualify as a “bomb cyclone” and featured thunderstorms and lightning, two phenomena rarely seen in snowstorms. And while it was crippling and potentially dangerous for millions of people along the East Coast, meteorologists found themselves raving about its combination of power and beauty.

The storm reached the “Goldilocks situation”: the ideal temperature for wet, heavy snow; warmer and its precipitation would not have fallen as snow. If it were colder, there wouldn’t have been as much moisture in the air to fuel that snowfall, said Owen Shieh, warning coordination meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center in Maryland.

It also followed the ideal trail for maximum snowfall. A little further inland, it would have lost its warm oceanic energy; a little farther offshore, and the heaviest snow would have fallen on the water, said Jeff Masters, co-founder of Weather Underground and now a meteorologist at Yale Climate Connections.

“I’ve always been fascinated by how Mother Nature manages to put all the pieces together to maximize the most extreme outcome,” said private meteorologist Ryan Maue, former chief scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

A great place for snow that adds up

“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 it adds to that classic feel,” Shieh said.

At 33.5 inches (85.1 centimeters) around noon Monday, Providence set its all-time snowfall record, breaking the previous record set in 1978, and it was still snowing, the National Weather Service office in Boston reported. But the highest total reported so far was in Warwick, Rhode Island, which barely topped 3 feet at 36.2 inches (92 centimeters).

Islip Airport on Long Island, New York, as well as Somerset and Berkeley, Massachusetts, all had 31 inches (78.7 centimeters), and at least 19 weather stations in five states recorded 2 feet (61 centimeters) or more of snow. New York’s Central Park had more than 19.1 inches (48.5 centimeters), while Philadelphia reached 14 inches (35.6 centimeters), according to preliminary calculations from the weather service.

Winds peaked at 83 mph (133.6 kilometers per hour) in Nantucket, Massachusetts, with several locations on Cape Cod measuring hurricane-force winds.

And it’s the type of heavy, wet snow that often triggers heart attacks, Shieh said.

“Just a word of warning for those who are going to be shoveling snow, it will be easy to overexert yourself,” Shieh said. “So take frequent breaks.”

A superb bomb in development

Meteorologists measure the strength of a storm by the atmospheric pressure at its center. The lower it goes, the stronger it is. That storm intensified quickly, losing 39 millibars in 24 hours, easily surpassing the 24 millibars per day threshold to be classified as a “bombogenesis” or “bomb cyclone,” Shieh and Maue said.

“I guess you could call it a great bomb,” Maue said.

Winter storms like this one get their energy from the temperature contrast between cold air from land and warm, moist air from the ocean, as well as from the thermal energy of the seas themselves, Masters said.

“This is about as intense as it gets,” Maue said. Its lowest pressure, 966 millibars, would be a Category 2 hurricane if it were tropical, he said. He called it “a hurricane with snow.”

“It’s a classic not only in terms of the snowfall rate, but also the intensity of the storm itself,” said former weather service director Louis Uccellini, who wrote weather textbooks on winter storms, comparing them to the storms of 2016 and 1961. “It was just an incredible storm system.”

A study last summer found that in a warming world, the strongest northeast winds become significantly stronger.

Judah Cohen of MIT said an extended polar vortex — when ultracold air usually trapped near the North Pole pushes farther south — began just before the storm and was a factor. And he conducted a separate study last year, revealing that these extents of polar vortices are increasing as the Arctic warms.

Snow storm and lightning

An unusual combination of winter and summer conditions – thunderstorms and lightning – broke out at times with this storm, captivating on-air meteorologists. That’s because “you only see it during 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 11 years ago when lightning struck during a storm he was reporting on.

“Fucking smoke. We still got it baby,” Cantore shouted. “Same place. Amazing.”

Meteorologist Matthew Cappucci, who grew up in Plymouth and said he longed for thunderstorms, gushed about how “really cool” it was that this winter storm unleashed lightning on a New York skyscraper and on wind turbines off the Massachusetts coast. Shieh said the weather service had no reports of thunderstorms in New York.

Exactly what a Nor’Easter should look like

Meteorologists like Cappucci, Cohen and Uccellini, who love snow and extreme weather, raved about satellite images of the storm, where they could see all the features that allowed it to come together perfectly.

Shieh said it looked almost too good, like something out of a disaster movie.

“It almost looks like CGI (computer-generated imagery),” he said.

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