The South was feeling the frosty effects on Wednesday of a powerful winter storm, known
as a “bomb cyclone,” forecast to hit most of the Eastern United States,
prolonging a stretch of strikingly bitter cold that has enveloped much
of the country and already buried some places under a record amount of snow.
Months
after a busy hurricane season, the storm brought frigid wind, freezing
rain and even snow to parts of northern Florida and southern Georgia —
areas unaccustomed to white winters. The National Weather Service warned
of hazardous travel conditions, including limited visibility and icy
roads. Forecasters expect the storm to eventually hit the Northeast, all
the way up to Maine.
Here’s the latest:
•
A winter storm warning has been issued by the National Weather Service
for parts of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, with heavy snowfall
and wind chills of up to -25 degrees expected.
•
Freezing rain and ice shut down significant stretches of highway in
northern Florida. The authorities in Leon County, which includes
Tallahassee, said Wednesday that more than 50 miles of road on
Interstate 10 had been closed in both directions, as were parts of
Highway 90.
•
Airlines have canceled many flights to and from destinations along the
East Coast and warned that their schedules could face continued
disruptions. American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, JetBlue, Southwest and
United were among the major carriers that said passengers could change
certain travel plans without penalties.
Continue reading the main story
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
•
It was 35 degrees in Jacksonville, Fla., and New Orleans; 23 degrees in
Jackson, Miss.; 28 degrees in Atlanta; and 14 degrees in the
Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina, as of about 7:30 a.m. on
Wednesday.
•
It was the coldest it has been in Raleigh-Durham in more than 130
years. A temperature of 9 degrees at the area’s airport tied a record
low set in 1887, the National Weather Service said.
• Sign up for the Morning Briefing for news and a daily look at what you need to know to begin your day.
So, what’s this about a ‘bomb cyclone’?
When
discussing the storm, some weather forecasters have referred to a “bomb
cyclone.” Calling it a “bomb” sounds dire, but those kinds of storms
are not exceedingly rare — there was one in New England recently.
What
makes a storm a “bomb” is how fast the atmospheric pressure falls;
falling atmospheric pressure is a characteristic of all storms. By
definition, the barometric pressure must drop by at least 24 millibars
in 24 hours for a storm to be called a bomb cyclone.
Here’s
how it works: Deep drops in barometric pressure occur when a region of
warm air meets one of cold air. The air starts to move, and the rotation
of the earth creates a cyclonic effect. The direction is
counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere (when viewed from above),
leading to winds that come out of the northeast — a Nor’easter.
That’s
what happened at the end of October, when warm air from the remnants of
a tropical cyclone over the Atlantic collided with a cold front coming
from the Midwest. Among other impacts then, more than 80,000 electric
customers in Maine lost power as high winds toppled trees.
A
similar effect is expected late Wednesday, as warm air over the ocean
meets extremely cold polar air that has descended over the East.
Pressure is expected to fall quickly from Florida northward.
Continue reading the main story
New York and the Northeast can expect frigid and snowy conditions.
New York City
is forecast to receive four to six inches of snow, beginning Wednesday
night, with a dangerously cold -14 degree wind chill, the Weather
Service said in a briefing.
Chilly
gusts of up to 50 m.p.h. are likely to whip eastern Long Island and
southeastern Connecticut starting late Thursday morning, bringing with
them the potential for downed tree limbs and scattered power outages,
the National Weather Service said.
Over
a foot of snow, with possible blizzard conditions, is likely in New
London and New Haven Counties in Connecticut, in Suffolk County on Long
Island and in Middlesex County in New Jersey through Thursday.
A
25- to 50-mile westward shift of the storm’s predicted path would
increase the likelihood of a foot of snow for Long Island and
Connecticut and more than six inches in the New York and New Jersey
metropolitan areas.
For Bostonians,
Wednesday’s forecast high of 28 degrees was almost a welcome relief
after days of temperatures that hovered in or near the single digits.
But it was quite literally cold comfort, with Thursday’s storm expected
to drop 8 to 12 inches of snow on the city and potentially create
blizzard conditions up and down the New England coast.
The
National Weather Service posted winter storm warnings beginning at 1
a.m. Thursday for a broad swath of Massachusetts and all of Rhode
Island, and a blizzard warning stretched along much of the coast, from
Cape Cod to the Canadian border.
“Travel will be very difficult to impossible,” said a bulletin
from the Weather Service’s office in Taunton, Mass., which also warned
of potential for coastal flooding and up to 14 inches of snowfall in
places. The snow could fall as fast as 2-3 inches per hour on Thursday
morning, the service said.
The storm will follow a long period of deep cold that has already taxed transit systems, fuel supplies and homeless shelters in New England. And it has turned many of the region’s harbors to ice.
“Oh
yeah, we’re frozen solid,” said Dawson Farber, the harbormaster in
Dennis, Mass., who said the harbor looked like “a huge saltwater skating
rink right in front of my window.”
As the South endured a particularly unusual dose of frigid weather, Washington remained
firmly in the grip of a winter that has already proven treacherous. The
District of Columbia government activated its cold emergency plan on
Dec. 27, and on Wednesday, it extended it further.
Washington’s
strategy calls for emergency shelters to open in all four of the city’s
quadrants and for officials to provide transportation to “warmth and
safety.”
On Wednesday morning, city firefighters were breaking ice
along a segment of the Potomac River that divides Virginia and the
District. The city also noted that the weather was proving helpful for
training: Workers were using the arctic conditions to train for ice
rescues.
Continue reading the main story
Snow is falling in some unlikely places.
By
the time workdays would normally be beginning, light snow had already
fallen in northern Florida and southern Georgia — areas that are not
highly accustomed to winter weather.
Tallahassee, Florida’s capital,
sees flurries every few years, said Mark Wool, a meteorologist with the
National Weather Service’s Tallahassee office. But the tenth to
two-tenths of an inch of snow recorded Wednesday? Not since 1989.
“It’s quite rare,” Mr. Wool said. “Everybody down here’s pretty excited.”
The
dusting, which was preceded by a couple of hours of freezing rain,
lasted about an hour. It was over by about 9 a.m., though more snow was
falling just north of Tallahassee, in southern Georgia.
Chris Jones, the fire chief in Thomas County in southern Georgia, said the snowfall was brief there, too.
“The
radar indication was almost spot on: When it moved past us on the
radar, it almost stopped immediately,” said Mr. Jones, who added that
there had been small accumulations, but that the roads were rapidly
clearing.
A
handful of school districts in North Florida that had already resumed
classes after winter break, including in Tallahassee and Gainesville,
had previously closed. It is the second time in recent months that many
children in the area will lose school days because of the weather:
Hurricane Irma forced shutdowns in September.
Southern governors are encouraging residents to stay aware.
Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina
said on Wednesday he would declare an emergency in places forecast to
be affected by the storm, including eastern counties unused to snow. Up
to 8 inches are expected in Camden and Currituck Counties, in the
state’s northeastern edge.
“What I worry about are people in their homes who may lose power and may lose the ability to heat their homes,” Mr. Cooper said.
His
administration is providing four-wheelers and Humvees to local
governments to help people who might get stranded. State troopers are
marking abandoned cars along roads to ensure no one is left stranded.
“The
good news is that the storm is moving quickly and should be gone by
Thursday evening,” the governor said. “The bad news is that we will have
unusually cold temperatures sticking around for several days.”
On Tuesday, Gov. Nathan Deal of Georgia
declared an emergency for 28 counties along or near the state’s
southeastern coast. Mr. Deal’s declaration includes Chatham County, home
to about 289,000 people.
Mr. Deal was among the Georgia politicians who received criticism
after a winter storm paralyzed Atlanta in 2014. In a statement on
Tuesday evening, he noted that the state Department of Transportation
had sent all of its brine trucks, as well as 75 plows, to southeast
Georgia.
“I encourage all Georgians in the potentially impacted areas to stay informed, get prepared and be safe,” he said.
What’s happening to the birds that flew south for the winter?
Continue reading the main story
Geoff LeBaron, the director of Audubon’s Christmas Bird Count,
a kind of early-winter bird census that has been taking place since the
year 1900, said that, fortunately, birds that could not effectively
weather cold snaps were already further south than the continental
United States.
“Warblers,
thrushes, tanagers, they’re down in Central and South America,” he
said. “The birds that winter in the Southern U.S. are better able to
withstand the temperatures and have more flexibility in terms of the
food they can eat.”
Mr.
LeBaron said that waterfowl and marsh birds might be affected if there
was significant snow cover or if water sources were frozen over.
And
he warned that the increasing number of hummingbirds that spend the
winter in the South might be affected, and said that people who maintain
the birds’ feeders should keep the feeders warm and well-supplied.
But he said that the short amount of time the cold was expected to last would allow others to scrounge through.
“The birds that are wintering down there are going to have to hunker down and deal with the conditions,” he said.
Just like the humans.
No comments:
Post a Comment