A “superbomb” storm is being predicted for Christmas Day in the Northeast United states according to WeatherBell Meteorologist Dr. Ryan Maue who has pointed out it looks to be reminiscent of the Cleveland Superbomb of 1978 aka the “Great New England Blizzard of 1978”.
This GFS forecast model for Christmas Day shows the depth of the low, poised to gather moisture from the Great Lakes and dump it into the Northeastern U.S. over the next 24-48 hours, potentially making Christmas and post-Christmas travel a nightmare, but … there is a twist.
Dr. Maue adds on his Twitter feed:
Exciting to see extreme weather forecasts with an item that requires dusting off the record books. 958 mb low
For reference, a 958 millibar low pressure system is as low as the central pressure for some tropical storms and nearly that of some hurricanes. For example Hurricane Sandy had a central pressure of 940 mbar or 27.76 inHg.
According to the Time article on the Cleveland Superbomb of 1978:
Meteorologists have a name for a storm that occurs when air pressure drops very rapidly as a jet stream brings in moisture: a weather bomb. In late January 1978, a low-pressure system moving from the Gulf Coast met with two other low-pressure systems, one from the Southwest and one from Canada, to create one of the worst snowstorms the Midwest has ever seen. With barometric pressure so low, it was more like a hurricane than a snowstorm, the so-called Cleveland Superbomb dumped 1-3 ft. (30-90 cm) of snow on several Midwestern states, including Ohio, Indiana and Michigan. Wind gusts approached 100 m.p.h. (160 km/h), causing snowdrifts to reach heights of 25 ft. (8 m) in some areas. Such snowdrifts made roadways impassable, forcing doctors and emergency personnel to ski and snowmobile their way to those in need. Indiana’s governor sent tanks down I-65 to remove stranded trucks, while in Ohio, National Guard helicopters flew some 2,700 missions to help stranded drivers. About 70 deaths are attributed to the storm.
While the Cleveland Superbomb has an intriguing name, the most well-known snowstorm of that year was known simply as the Great New England Blizzard of 1978. On Feb. 6, about two weeks after the Superbomb, a blizzard dealt Boston and other parts of the Northeast as many as 27 in. (69 cm) of snow with winds of 80-110 m.p.h. (130-180 km/h). Thousands of homes were damaged or destroyed and approximately 100 people died.
Maue adds:
https://twitter.com/RyanMaue/status/545288516591030272
https://twitter.com/RyanMaue/status/545289623228805120/photo/1
https://twitter.com/RyanMaue/status/545290397014958080
https://twitter.com/RyanMaue/status/545291816380006402
https://twitter.com/RyanMaue/status/545290824976564224
https://twitter.com/RyanMaue/status/545291107353899009
I’ll add, it also has nothing to do with that other favorite catchphrase of the media, the “polar vortex”.
Anyone who lived in the Midwest during the winters of ’76-’77, ’77-’78, and ’78-’79 will remember the exceptional cold and snow of the late ’70s in that part of the world.
1-17-1977 is the coldest night I’ve ever experienced: -25°F, and about -60°F wind chill, struggling home on shank’s ponies after our van froze up at 2 am on the way back from a b-ball game. If not for a Good Samaritan in a Corvette, we’d all have had frostbite, if not a trip to the undertaker. Yeah, it took two trips – ladies first, ‘n’ all.
By contrast, this past summer out in the desert, I didn’t get my 120°F bike ride; had to settle for 119°.
‘Didn’t need to be rescued, either.
when reading this one has to ask ,where is St Gore spending Christmas ?
Perhaps once his bleed AGW dry of funds he can rent himself out to ski resorts as a type of ‘human ‘ snow blower .
Slightly OT — I was watching The Weather Channel at about 3 PM MST today, and could have sworn they had the graphics of a low-pressure area on the east coast of the US, with the winds rotating CW instead of CCW. When this caught my attention (I was running on the treadmill), they switched to a different map before I could verify this.
See something ? Say something !
I think Dr Maue is giving us fair warning…..!
So North America is going to steal all the snow this year as well.
you got it all last year, leave some for us this year you greedy barstewards!
I don’t need or want that much, just a nice white blanket for christmas.
Leon says:
“It is my understanding that it was all due to one article in time magazine…..however…:”
and provides a long list of references to the Ice Age scare – thanks, and I’ll keep it on file.
But you left out what I think is the most significant article, that of Rasool and Schneider in the esteemed journal Science in 1971, “Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Aerosols: Effects of Large Increases on Global Climate”. It was written with “many contributions” from James Hansen, so you know it’s got to be good.
The abstract is at http://www.sciencemag.org/content/173/3992/138 but the full text is paywalled after 43 years. The concluding words of the abstract say it all: “such a temperature decrease over the whole globe is believed to be sufficient to trigger an ice age.”
Schneider later distanced himself from the paper, citing numerous errors, but that’s curious, since his published climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 is 0.8K (more like 0.5K if you look at his figure 1), much closer to reality than more recent values from Hansen, IPCC, et al.
Perhaps when the glaciers grind across Manhattan to engulf the NASA/GISS Seinfeld Lab, Schneider’s early work will be vindicated.
Rudolph the Red predicts rain Christmas Eve.
Ah, that’s because Rudolph the Red knows rain dear. My favorite Christmas pun.
November 1950 sticks in my mind. The snow buried the house on the east and west sides where the doors were. Dad climbed out a south window to shovel out the doors and was throwing the snow well above his 6’2″ head. The Nat’l Guard came to fetch him in a tank with plow front.. Joe D’Aleo has an article on Weatherbell about that storm. http://www.weatherbell.com/newsletter-9-20-2011-d
Weather modification ? http://youtu.be/NNwkXVt89P8
My solar based long range forecast had it cooling again close to Xmas, and turning sharply colder from around the 27th Dec. The cold should begin to ease from around 20th Jan, and with the next major cold shot starting from just after mid March.
As the article that you linked to points out, the Cleveland Superbomb and the Great New England Blizzard were two separate events that winter, separated by about 2 weeks. This is apparent from the track of the storm, a bombing low well to the west of New England means that New England is on the warm side of the storm, i.e., the counterclockwise circulation would bring up warm air from the south.
Indeed, the extended forecast for Rochester, NY is predicting rain Christmas Eve with highs in the upper 40s. A changeover to snow might occur once the low passes to our east. Or, to quote from the current NWS forecast discussion out of Buffalo (http://www.nws.noaa.gov/view/prodsByState.php?state=NY&prodtype=discussion): “TEMPERATURES SHOULD COOL CHRISTMAS DAY AND BEYOND. THIS WILL PROBABLY CHANGE OVER PRECIPITATION TO SNOW BUT SIGNIFICANT…OR ANY…ACCUMULATION IS STILL HIGHLY UNCERTAIN.”
nearly 60 years ago (March 1956) there were 3 blizzards within a week in New England, the 3rd with some unusual properties (see article)…. if this were to happen today then ofc the shrieks about “climate change” and CO2 would be unending….. not sure what can be said about climate change and 1956…..
http://docs.lib.noaa.gov/rescue/mwr/084/mwr-084-03-0116.pdf
This storm/storms gets neglected in discussions of worst east coast winter storms because there were 3 different storms, and ofc it’s mild compared to what Buffalo can get…. but for the Boston area this was severe weather, or so I’ve heard (it was all before my time).
That reminds me of a similar sequence of whopper storms two years later, in March 1958. More than 50 inches fell in the NW suburbs of Philadelphia. Closer in, where I was a kid, two feet of slop stripped all the branches off a pine in our front yard, something that happened all over the place and knocked out the power for 3-4 days. My dad cooked hot dogs in the fireplace, an experience awesome enough that I repeated it for my kids years later in Colorado, where these storms are a bit more common.
I love the Monthly Weather Review reference, back when the MWR was written by Weather Bureau people and was, we.ll, a review of the weather (not climate). So here’s the 1958 equivalent: http://docs.lib.noaa.gov/rescue/mwr/086/mwr-086-03-0109.pdf and another link with more numbers http://www.glenallenweather.com/historylinks/1958/3-19-1958snow.pdf
1957-58 was an El Nino winter, but nobody knew it back then. There was also a monster solar flare that lit up the northern lights over Cuba. Between the two, I’d say the Nino had more effect
Dr. Keen, thanks for your comments.
My recollection of your article of several years ago, suggests that the current nearly El Nino conditions increases the chance of a big snow dump in the foothills above Boulder in the spring. How is my memory?
Don, youf memory serves you well. The article you’re thinking of is probably this:
Thirty years in the Bull’s-eye: a climatology of meter-class snow storms in the Front Range foothills
CU Hydrologic Sciences Symposium 2010
http://hydrosciences.colorado.edu/symposium/abstract_details_archive.php?abstract_id=155
which concluded that a big snow dump (40 inches or more) is 15 times more likely during el Nino than otherwise. The storms are those recorded at my home/weather station (I’m a 30-year co-op observer) at 9000 feet, but most of the storms in question were big snows in Boulder, too (a few were rain down there).
As for this year, my opinion is that there is not and has not been an el Nino, but that all depends on what criteria one takes. There’s been some warm equatorial water in the Pacific, and one westerly wind burst and Kelvin wave back in January. But the atmosphere has never kicked into el Nino mode, so there’s been no westerly wind busts, cyclone pairs (which are my pet symptoms of el Nino), and above all, no big Front Range snow dumps!
I mentioned before that Cleveland set a record low pressure.
In http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/10/35-years-ago-the-witch-of-november-come-stealin/ I look at other Great Lakes storms and noted:
Similar pressure, less cold, no problem!
I have a couple links that still work, Gunga Din found one of them, http://www.crh.noaa.gov/dtx/stories/blizzard1978.php . One paragraph of note:
Weatherbell Analytics is using 1976-77 as one of their analog years. Maybe we’ll have two good winters.
Finally, the lowest pressure was recorded recently in a non-blizzard:
End the politics. Sandy was NOT a hurricane.
Sandy was a hurricane, but not when it reached New Jersey.
In the 1970’s I was living in Calumet Michigan. I don’t remember most of the storms as a normal winter breeze seemed like about 30 knots. . For me It was put more wood inside, cardboard around the car, make sure of the beer supply and stoke the sauna. I do remember the Nov 11,1975 storm as I lost some possessions.
After one storm, I do remember joining a crew poling for cars on snow shoes in town. Poling for cars was basically carrying a sack of colored bamboo poles and poking them down in the snow. When you hit the familiar sound of a car you poked around to mark the corners so the huge truck mounted snow blowers could get close without actually hitting the car. Very tiring work.
Anthony; how could a practising meteorologist allow such a blog post? There’s no nice way to put it. At 168 hours out the GFS (Goofy For Snow) model is a joke. Even the ECMWF has large uncertainties at that range, but I do trust it a bit more than the GFS. Apparently the ECMWF says “not so much snow and cold”. The blog post is overhyping things.
As Vic Werme states, the Cleaveland 1978 Superbomb was a warm storm in New England, between two far worse New England blizzards. It had the effect of turning the street-side snowbanks, leftover from the first blizzard, to slush, which then froze as hard as rock, and became a problem when the second blizzard arrived, as the snowbanks wouldn’t budge and the snow plowed by plows went up the rock-like banks and then tumbled back down into the streets behind the plows.
Another effect of the warm storm was surprise flooding on the coast of Maine. The bays and inlets and harbors opened to the southeast, and the warm southeast wind was so strong it sort of dented your eyeballs. The tide kept right on rising after high tide.
I was living on a shack on a dock on the Harraseeket River in South Freeport, and my idyllic little home was washed off the dock onto the mudflats. It is an amazing thing to watch your house go blub-blub-blub. I had a extensive collection of Jimi Hendrix albums which was ruined, for it turned out it was impossible to remove mudflat mud from the grooves of those old fashioned records. It seemed tragic at the time, however it was probably healthy to stop listening to that stuff all day. Every storm has a silver lining.
Forecast pressure on 12.24.2014.
http://cci-reanalyzer.org/Forecasts/frames/GFS/NH/PMSL/48.png
Forecast Jetstream on 24/12/2014.
http://cci-reanalyzer.org/Forecasts/frames/GFS/NH/WS250/48.png
Instead of using the power of computers to model CO2 and hockey sticks, is anyone working on digitizing past conditions that led to notable events? If not, they should. Then present conditions could be compared and warnings issued to actually save lives now instead of hypothetically 100 years from now.
To accomplish that would be a grant that wouldn’t be throwing good money after bad.
It will be about 980 hPa in the center. Wind over 100 km/h.
That stupendous storm hit NYC hard. Not only did we get a lot of snow, the neap tide arrived with the storm and many coastal homes were either damaged or destroyed.
I was watching the news during the storm and was stunned to see one of my friends be rescued by the fire department from her home which was surrounded by raging seas and then her lovely Victorian house with a huge porch was chewed to bits and utterly sucked into the raging seas and vanished forever.
She told me later that she heard someone using a battering ram on her back door, ran downstairs and plunged into water, ran back up and opened the window and began screaming and a neighbor got the fire department for her which was only a few blocks away.
She nearly died! And people did die.
An unfortunate (as in really bad weather) start for this forecast….
“Average global atmospheric and oceanic temperatures will drop significantly beginning between 2015”
“The Space and Science Research Corporation (SSRC) announces today an important set of climate change predictions dealing with the coming cold climate epoch that will dominate global temperatures for the next thirty years.
According to analysis of the most reliable solar activity trends and climate models based on the Relational Cycle Theory (RC Theory), the SSRC concludes the following: http://spaceandscience.net/id16.html
Regarding whether Sandy was a hurricane as it reached NJ, the data show surface temperatures actually rose a bit as the eye moved onshore, a few miles south of my location. So, it was still warm core. One could speculate that NWS wonks, who decided a couple of days beforehand that it would transition to extratropical before landfall, were self-serving and trying to save face in not issuing hurricane warnings, and then also in subsequently classifying it as extratropical prior to the eye’s evening landfall. Certainly there were tropical storm force winds in the afternoon; why at least no TS warning? Can you say “verification?” Can you say “desire to not issue overly-complicated and onerous Hurricane Local Statements and associated grids?” The odds favor Sandy being reclassified as a hurricane after further review in a few years. Of course, that’s way too late to follow the “course of least regret” (the tenet which the NWS always used to follow) and truly warn the populace of approaching hurricane conditions. I believe more people would have evacuated and not been in harm’s way had a hurricane warning been issued, and administrative geeks not been in charge.
The most recent run of the European model does not show a Gulf Coast Storm forming.
The global model shows the storm staying too far south to form snow.
http://meteocentre.com/models/
Now the global model agrees with the European model.
Scotland was hit by a “weather bomb” last week, much hyped by Met Office forecasters, the BBC and other gullible alarmists. It was windy for about 6 hours and some trees were blown over. There were some big waves on western shores, and some rain also fell, snow on the mountains. I don’t think anybody died. In the 1970s, 80s and even 90s, this kind of weather was called “a wet and windy day”.
Just in time for the start of winter. Stay warm East-coasters, it could be a rough winter for you.