'Bomb Cyclone' hits America's east coast with 70mph blizzards.

This week is ending with almost the entire East Coast being covered in a sheet of snow. A large, rapidly intensifying winter storm that began on Wednesday dumped over a foot of snow in New England, but also brought with it damaging winds, and dangerous, icy, coastal flooding.

The city of Boston, according to the National Weather Service, also broke a record for its high tide, the result of the storm’s winds pushing an already high tide further onshore.

It all started Wednesday, when most of the coast was under a winter storm watch or warning. It was the last thing East Coasters wanted after enduring one of the coldest holiday seasons on record.

On Wednesday, nearly the entire East Coast of the United States was under a winter storm watch or warning.

Even Florida was experiencing weirdly cold weather, with a freeze watch or warning in place for much of the state (leading to weird things like near-frozen iguanas dropping from trees). The light dusting of snow then brought some Florida cities to a standstill since they don’t have snow removal equipment or ice trucks.

As the storm crawled up the East Coast, it experienced a rapid drop in pressure, and grew intense, quickly. At its peak, the storm resembled something like a hurricane: a “bomb cyclone” spinning around a central eye.


The storm was a “textbook” example of a winter cyclone, Jeff Frame, an atmospheric scientist at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign said. In satellite photos, you can even see the system pulling up warmer air from the tropics, as well as the system circulating colder air coming down from the arctic. Storms like this, he says, serve an important function as they help redistribute pockets of heat and cold more evenly around the globe.


But the consequence of all that movement was a lot of cold moisture for those on the ground. Boston saw a foot of snow, and downtown streets were flooded with ice-capped waters. Twenty thousand people in Massachusetts lost power.


New York saw around half of a foot of snow in some place. Accumulations decrease the further South you travel, but even Virginia Beach saw blizzard conditions. Though Southern cities like Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia, only got a few inches of snow and freezing rain, it quickly turned to a dangerous situation on roadways.




Culled from Vox.