Call it what you want to: The Blizzard of 2016, Winter Storm Jonas or Snowzilla. The fact is that for tens of millions of people from New York to the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky and West Virginia, this storm lived up to — and even exceeded — the days of hype leading up to it.
In New York City, for example, millions of residents went to bed on Friday night expecting to wake up to a few inches of snow, only to find a raging blizzard outside. The storm is already the No. 2 snowstorm on record in Central Park.
Name the winter weather hazard — this storm brought it. Freezing rain? Check. Hurricane-force winds? Check. Snowfall accumulations above 40 inches? Also check. How about the first snowstorm on record to dump at least 18 inches of snow in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and New York City? Yes, another check.
See also: The East Coast snowstorm in photos
This storm even sent flakes flying in northern Florida on Friday evening, and more than 6 inches of snow fell in Georgia, a state not known for its wintry weather.
On top of the wintry precipitation, coastal flooding brought back memories of Hurricane Sandy along part of the New Jersey and Delaware shorelines, with record coastal flood levels recorded at both Cape May, New Jersey and Lewes, Delaware, on Saturday morning.
For residents of the Washington, D.C., area, as well as Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York, this storm earned its place alongside the great blizzards of the past. For weather forecasters, it most closely resembled the Blizzard of 1996, which caused more than 100 deaths and $4.5 billion in damage, and took a similar path off the East Coast.
For New Yorkers, it may forever be remembered as a Saturday surprise, with forecast snow totals escalating seemingly by the minute on Saturday, winding up at a staggering 20 to 30 inches. This was enough to force Mayor Bill de Blasio to order a rare travel ban on city streets, close Broadway theaters and restaurants, and otherwise try to lull “the city that never sleeps” into at least a nap.
Numerous snowfall records have fallen from this storm, including the heaviest one-day snowfall at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport.
The 21.4-inch snow total in Washington, D.C., ranks as that city’s first 20-inch plus storm in nearly 100 years, and the second-largest snowstorm in the city’s history.
Why was this storm so ridiculously snowy
The storm may have seemed mysterious to many people, given that narrow, heavy snow bands formed and seemingly stood still for hours at a time, giving some areas near-whiteout conditions while leaving other locations with far less snow.
However, scientists actually understand quite a bit about storms like this and, in a way, this event was reassuring. Unlike blizzards that occurred a few decades ago, largely without warning, this one was forecast seven days ahead of time, when multiple computer models run by different agencies in different countries all converged on the same ominous solution.
Unfortunately, the one surprise with this storm — the blitz of snow that slammed New York — just happened to occur in the nation’s most populous city. But let’s let that slide for a moment.
In a conference call with reporters on Thursday, Louis Uccellini, the director of the National Weather Service and a scholar of East Coast snowstorms, said he has never seen another storm where the computer model guidance signaled a threat so far in advance, and so accurately.
“I do not remember seeing four or five modeling systems having this much consistency” out to a week in advance, he said. “We’re living in interesting times. I haven’t seen that before.”
The storm resulted from a rare and potent mix of ingredients that came together at just the right moment to create a powerful storm. What’s more is that the storm was located in the perfect spot to produce an East Coast blizzard of the sort that might come along once in 20 years, or even longer for some.
First and foremost, there was an upper level low pressure area that dug a deep dip, or trough, in the jet stream across the southeast. The circulation around this low and the jet stream winds associated with it produced an area of strong lift in the atmosphere out ahead of it.
This helped trigger a surface low pressure area, which strengthened rapidly on Friday night and Saturday morning as it moved up the coast to a position east of the Delaware shoreline by midday Saturday. The upper low aligned itself on top of the low at the surface, creating a vertically stacked, whirling vortex off the East Coast that sat and spun like a top throughout the day on Saturday.
Each wobble of this low sent heavy snowbands spiraling inland, plastering D.C., Philadelphia and New York City with at least 2 feet of snow.
The moisture feed from this storm was incredibly long — based on satellite imagery, the storm was tapping moisture from as far south as the Bahamas, and as far east as the Gulf Stream waters of the Atlantic Ocean.
Image: Alex Brandon/Associated Press
The storm greedily gulped down this moisture via an unusually strong airflow known as a low level jet stream, which gave the storm a powerful east-to-west feed, which acted like a straw that the storm could suck on to ingest relatively mild, moist air.
Ocean temperatures off the coast were well above average, by about 5 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit, for this time of year, adding extra energy to the storm and providing it with more moisture. Some of this warmth is related to natural variability and an unusually low amount of storminess across this region in the past several months. (Storms, be they hurricanes and non-tropical systems like this blizzard, tend to stir up colder ocean waters from deeper layers of water.)
However, some of it may also be due to man-made global warming. Last year was the warmest year on record, and higher temperatures on land and at sea means there is more moisture available for storm systems like this one.
“Take unusually warm Atlantic ocean surface temperatures (temperatures are in the 70s off the coast of Virginia), add a cold Arctic outbreak (something we’ll continue to get even as global warming proceeds), mix them together and you get huge amounts of energy and moisture, and monster snowfalls,” said Michael Mann, a climate researcher who directs Penn State University’s Earth System Science Center, in an interview prior to the storm’s arrival in Washington.
Mann said it isn’t clear how big of a role climate change might be playing, though, compared to other factors.
Image: WeatherBell Analytics
It will require specific extreme event attribution studies to determine how global warming may have shifted the odds in favor of such an unusually prolific snowmaker.
One other ingredient was important to this storm.
There was a strong, frigid area of high pressure to the north of the system. The circulation around this high injected cold, dry air into the storm system, feeding it through what meteorologists know as a “cold conveyor belt.” This ensures that the mild, moist air gets wrung out of the atmosphere in the form of snow, not rain.
The strength and position of the high kept the storm from advancing northward and slamming New England with a massive snowstorm, much to the delight of many Bostonians who experienced a record snowy winter last year.
The pressure difference between the low-pressure area crawling along the Mid-Atlantic coast and the high-pressure area to the north also resulted in extremely strong winds directed at the coast. Wind gusts reached hurricane force (74 miles per hour) in multiple locations.
In the end, though, knowing the meteorology behind this storm is probably not much solace to the tens of millions who have to begin a long process of digging their way out of this storm, which, in some places, includes trying to identify cars under three-foot snow drifts and waiting for electricity to be restored.
If you ask a meteorologist what got them interested in their career, many of them would tell you a tale of a specific storm that got them hooked when they were about 9 or 10 years old. For this writer, it was Hurricane Gloria in 1985.
Let’s just say that many future meteorologists were born this weekend.
