New England Snow Has Officially Gotten Ridiculous

  A woman at her home in eastern Massachusetts yesterday.
Photo via Twitter, @JohnDePetroshow  

I know, I know, New England snow, New England snow.

I now think I can safely say that some parts of southeastern New England probably have not seen snow like this since it was settled in the 1600s.

Bouts of snow in 1717, the mid-1800s, 1978 and 1996 come close but this really takes the cake.

Yesterday pushed everything into the ridiculous zone. The huge headline on today's Boston Globe says it all "Piling It On."

I'll say. Let's go to the numbers.

The storm that ended in southern New England dumped 23.1 inches of snow on Boston, whih was the 7th biggest snowstorm on record there.

That's the second storm within two weeks to score in Boston's Top 10 storms. The blizzard on January 26 and 27 was Boston's sixth biggest, with 24.6 inches.

There was also 37 inches of snow on the ground in Boston yesterday, after it settled and compacted. That's the most on the ground on record there.

So far, 40.1 inches of snow has fallen on Boston in February. If only 5.3 more inches of snow falls there this month, it'll be the snowest on record. The chances of that happening are excellent.

Until now the record in Boston for the most snow in a 30 day stretch was 58.8 inches, during the period ending on February 7 1978, the tail end of the Great Blizzard of 1978.

The new record now set is 71 inches. But that's only in the past 17 days. There's nearly two weeks to go and more snow is forecast for Boston. Yep, more snow.

GRIM FORECAST

Front page of today's
Boston  Globe.  

This next one looks really nasty. It's a little soon to tell, but present indications are the next storm won't be nearly as deep as yesterday's or the January blizzard.  Even if the snow amounts are uncertain with the next storm, it will be very windy and very cold during the next storm.

The pattern with the expected Thursday and Friday storm is similar to many of the others. An energetic Alberta clipper type storm is now in the upper Midwest, causing a mess of snow, sleet, freezing rain and wind in parts of the Dakotas and Minnesota.

The Clipper will come across the Great Lakes, across New York and into northern and western New England.

In those places, towns like Houghton, Michigan, Watertown, New York  and Burlington, Vermont, that Clipper will dump perhaps one to as much as five inches of snow. No big deal, especially since in those areas, the snow on the ground is fairly robust, but not ridiculously deep.

Then, here we go again, the Alberta Clipper will transfer to and off the coast and blow up into a massive storm.

Though it's almost certain several inches of snow will fall on eastern Massachusetts, it's not clear yet if by several inches, I mean five inches or 20 inches. It's a little unclear how far off the coast this thing will blow up.

What is more certain is the wind. Since the storm will really crank up explosively off the coast it'll generate strong north to northeast winds. That's dangerous in two major respects: With several feet of powdery snow on the ground already, the blowing and drifting will be horrendous. I wouldn't be surprised if drifts are 10 feet tall or more once this storm's done.

Nobody's leaving via this Boston
basement door anytime soon.
Photo from Christopher Fielding, via Twitter.  

The other danger applies to all of New England, and much of the Northeast for that matter. The north winds will be accompanied by an Arctic blast which will plunge temperatures below zero. So being outside could get very dicey.

It gets worse. Another disturbance will dive almost due southward from the North Pole into New England Sunday. That'll make the cold even worse, driving temperatures into the teens and 20s below zero in parts of northern New England.

This disturbance will - you guessed it! -- blow up just off the coast into a monsterous huge storm. Again, it's too soon to tell if this Sunday episode will develop into an eastern New England blizzard or just light snow.

Either way, winds will gust past 30 mph well inland in New York and Vermont with this feature and even stronger in eastern New England. With temperatures far below zero, this will be one of the most dangerous bouts of wind chills we've had in years.

A for instance: It the temperature is minus 10 and the wind is blowing at 25 mph, the wind chill is 37 below. Such conditions have a strong chance of happening on Sunday.

This second cold wave on Sunday will dive south all the way to Florida, so we might start hearing about frozen oranges and other crops in Florida by early next week.

There's a Jeep in there, I think, Hingham, Mass.  

DANGER AND EXPENSE:

Beyond the expense and severe inconvenience of all that snow lying around, things are getting dangerous.

The weight of the snow is beginning to collapse roofs, and if more snow comes, as predicted, that problem will get worse.

Roofs are starting to cave in under the weight of all that snow. The National Weather Service in Taunton, Mass this morning reported several snow-related structural failures. The roof of a building in Rockport, Mass called the "Piano Mill" collapsed this morning.

Nobody has been hurt by the collapses so far, but I worry about the possibility that a roof could give way on a building with people inside.

Meanwhile, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh said the city will have spent double its $18 million budget for snow removal by the end of this week. And winter is far from over.

WARM OCEAN WATER PRIME SUSPECT

One interesting thing I picked up on social media chatter in weather circles over the past few days is the water temperature off the New England coast. The water is much, much warmer than normal.

Here's what noted meteorologist and climate expert Michael Mann Tweeted yesterday:

Mann is saying here that SST's - that's sea surface temperature-  is 21 degrees warmer than normal off of Cape Cod. Temperatures that much warmer than normal has been totally unheard of out there until now.

It stands to reason that a storm encountering this warm water would strengthen faster and more robustly than otherwise.

Plus, whether or not the storm strengthens faster, the warmer water supplies more moisture to a storm system than cooler water would, so precipitation associated with the storm would be heavier with the toasty water.

The very warm water is almost surely a major player in New England's snow blitz this year.

With the storm that ended yesterday, five of Boston's biggest snowstorms have occurred since 2003.

The trend toward bigger Northeast snowstorms is widespread. None of the recent storms in Burlington, Vermont scored in that city's Top 20 biggest (northwestern New England has so far tended to only get the fringe effects of the past month's snow blitz.)

But in records dating back to the 1880s at least, eight of Burlington's 20 biggest snowstorms have occurred since the year 2000.  Statistically, you'd expect only one or at most two of the biggest snowstorms to have occured in the past 15 years. So something's going on.

Air and ocean temperatures along and off the East Coast have generally been increasingly warmer than normal for years now, a symptom of global warming. 

Even as things continue to warm up, winter is not canceled. You still can get sharp cold waves, like New England is getting now, and when these cold waves plunge into or interact with very warm air or water nearby, you get these big storms.

The only way now to stop the snow dump in the New England is weather pattern change, one that does not send nascent storms over that hot water off the coast.

The pattern will indeed change. We just don't yet know exactly when that will happen.