Atmospheric Rivers, Bomb Cyclones, and now, Killer Snow?
A whole new lexicon of disaster
Two weeks ago, winter chaos across the country delivered snow, wind and bitter cold to most of us. Then an atmospheric river started delivering a series of intense storms loaded with moisture to Northern California and the Northwest. Now intense winds are turning those storms into a bomb cyclone of floods across the Bay Area.
All in a two week stretch. And this may be only the beginning of the beginning for 2023. I live in Rochester, in Western New York where we have been relatively safe from these mega storms. Until Christmas weekend and the arrival of killer snow just down I90.
Killer snow is my own new describer for the atypical type of snow that has killed 41 and counting in the Buffalo New York area, only sixty miles from where I live. They got 55”, we got 1.7”. An anomaly of Great Lakes lake effect. But this snow was different and that difference killed a lot of people and stopped a bustling city dead for days. Emergency responders, including fire trucks and snow plows, got stuck, cars went nowhere, and a new kind of gridlock gripped the city for days.
And 41 people died. So ‘killer snow’ might be an appropriate descriptor. But what was different about it?