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| Bourne, MA |
"Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats."
- H.L. Mencken.
I hear ya, H.... we all love a little sugar on our cereal, but this is getting rucking fidiculous. We can't seem to begin or end a week without a major snow event, and this weekend.... oh, we'll get to that in a minute.
We'll be getting a bit of snow today, maybe 2-4" over SE Massachusetts. I'd bet on the 2" more than the 4". That barely makes a blip on the radar, with what we have coming this weekend. It really gets friggin' ponderous after a while.
We're not Canada, or Alaska, or Wisconsin, or even upstate New York. We get snow, but it's that pleasant Currier & Ives snow, the kind you go caroling in and build talking snowmen in. This is some straight-up Siberia we'e getting, and it sucks so hard that you are physically pulled towards the snowbank.
You start to wonder if Pat Robertson might have been on to something, and that we may right now be getting Smited by the good lord for some sin I can't quite put my finger on. Maybe it's gay marriage, maybe it's Governor Baker, and a great part of me feels that God is making us pay for the Snow Bowl/Tuck Rule game against the Oakland Raiders. We have offended ye, oh Lord, and the payback is Powder.
You could sort of see it coming. This is shaping up as a bad, bad, bad winter. Blizzards are a part of bad winters. You add the extra bad when we get a second blizzard, and throw in the third bad if the second blizzard happens before you clean up the first one. It gets even worse if it snows between those events, including two huge storms.
The Groundhog Storm and last Monday's storm, which dumped 2 feet over a wide area, barely crack the headlines. The Groundhog Storm was lucky enough to fall on a holiday, but I'm actually referring to a fairly historical storm from this week as "last Monday's storm." I can't see Sebastian Junger naming a book that.
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| Brant Rock, MA |
- One of the reasons that the Blizzard of '78 was so bad (and, concurrently, why no one talks about the 1969 storm that dropped .8" less than the '78 gale) is that the Blizz fell shortly (17 days) after we got nearly two feet of snow.
That snow had nowhere to go but on top of the old snow, which hadn't melted much. This led to those mammoth snow piles you recall if you lived through '78.
We have the same scenario now, just with more snow already on the ground. This storm isn't forecast to be a 2 footer, but any additional snow is trouble.
- You may not see 100% of your supermarket's parking lot until May. We had drifts last into June in the interior a few years ago.
- As you know, a blizzard is when you have three hours of blowing snow, 35+ mph winds, and markedly-reduced visibility. We should have that, no problem.
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| Sagamore, MA |
- We wouldn't need much snow to have a blizzard, provided it is blowing around a lot. This will be important to keep in mind on Cape Cod, where a smaller amount of snow will still bring blizzard conditions with the wind she'll be seeing.
- Buffalo once had a blizzard just from a windstorm billowing up already-fallen snow that was resting on frozen Lake Erie. With our snowpack, that could happen with this storm even if we got no snow from it... but don't you worry, we'll get lots of snow.
- Beaches had tons of rocks and sand wash up against the seawalls. That will make for a ramp that will amp up an otherwise modest storm tide. This tide will slam into very vulnerable coastal locations who A) have nowhere for the floodwater to go, and B) have already taken a blizzardy beating a few weeks ago.
- We're some time away, but I think that the worst of the storm may high-tide us with the north wind. That would be good news for places like Chatham or Plymouth, and bad news for places like Scituate or Sandwich.
- A big issue will be the track of the storm. American forecast models show an Alberta Clipper plowing through New York and moving over Cape Cod on Saturday night and Sunday. The European models show it coming at us through Pennsylvania and tracking east just under Nantucket.
The American model speaks of heavy snow for coastal Massachusetts, about the same area that got slammed in the last storm. SE Mass would be spared the heavy hit, and the trouble would run from Boston north into Maine. The European model is more indicative of a SE Massachusetts inclusion in the epicenter.
It's the difference between 4-8" of snow and more than a foot of it.
- Cranberry County has taken a beating this year. We're not as bad as Worcester (we never are) or even as bad as MetroWest, but we bore the brunt of the last storm (Cohasset had 26.5" of snow), and stand a good chance of getting socked again.
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| Bridgewater, MA |
Duxbury, for instance, got 2 feet from the blizzard. They got 6 more inches 3 days later, and then got 18" or so from the Groundhog storm. They got about 6 inches between that storm and last Monday, when they got almost 2 more feet. They have a very good chance of adding another foot or two this weekend.
- Duxbury is the same physical size as Boston, and has much more open area that needs plowing. Boston has 700,000 residents and countless businesses paying taxes to support clearing out Boston, while Duxbury has 13,000 or so.
- Truro, for instance, probably has a whole town to plow with the same amount of people you might find in two Boston housing projects that take up a supermarket's footprint on a map.
- Winds will be gusting up over 60 mph for much of the storm. That will snap power lines. Forecast low temperatures for relatively-temperate Bourne will be two degrees above zero. It should be fun with no heat and lights.
- Those winds and temperatures will make it very, very dangerous to be outside. If your car breaks down and you're a mile from help, you may die trying to get to it.
- If it helps ease the strain any, you can't call off school during school vacation, so we won't be adding June days to the school year for this storm. There is, somewhere, one family in Massachusetts who will be staring at the TV Monday, wondering why there are no school cancellations, and I wish I could be a guest in their kitchen that morning.
- Boy, I'd hate to live near a river when all of this snow starts melting in the spring.
- I haven't heard a peep from any local forecasters regarding a changeover to rain for anyone, even Cape Cod. That would be one of the things that could change with a wobble in the forecast track.
- Want me to mention that we weather geeks are already monitoring the possibility of another snow event, about a week from yesterday or so? Didn't think so!
- Please check out the GoFundMe page for Officer Jared MacDonald of the Bourne PD.
- Photo credits: Tristan, Jessica, Abby and Michelle.
We'll be back with an update as the storm nears. Remember, the storm's track could wobble a bit, and we would get off the hook . That doesn't seem likely, but I like to throw a disclaimer into these things.
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