Big Snow
It was nice to end the year with snow on the East Coast. After last year’s winter without much of a winter, December started with a nor’easter cruising up the coast. Though it was a pretty garden variety storm, it left some serious snow on the ground in parts of Pennsylvania and New York to the west of the Catskills as well as Vermont and New Hampshire. Up to 45 inches (114 centimeters) of snow fell in those locations, and the small town of Alba, Pennsylvania may have set the state’s 24-hour snowfall record with 43.3 (110 centimeters).
While the storm itself was pretty raggedy looking, it ended up delivering such massive snowfall totals thanks to temperatures in the snowfall sweet spot and extremely saturated air (your regular climate change reminder that a warmer atmosphere can hold more water, leading to more heavy frozen and liquid precipitation). While close-to-freezing temperatures can lead to goopy snow that pancakes in on itself, temperatures in the mid-teens and 20s primed things for the record-setting snowfall totals. Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang has a deep explainer on why that’s a must-read for nerds on snowflakes themselves as well as the structure of the storm that led to a persistent band of snow that delivered the goods (or bads if you’re not a fan of shoveling).
