Americans have become accustomed to having their storm information categorized to some extent. It's very handy. If you fear cyclones, don't buy a house in Tornado Alley. If you love snow, don't move to the Sun Belt. Don't sucker-punch anyone from Marblehead, don't eat at the E-Coli Deli, and don't swim in Hungry Crocodile Lake.
With just a few moments of study, you can even get a relative view of any large storm that hit your area. The storm that ruined your picnic might not seem so bad if you became aware of what storms have done to places like Gavelston, TX or Xenia, OH.
If you know the wind speed of the hurricane or tornado that hits your town, you can easily grade it along the lines of the rubric provided by the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale or the Fujita tornado intensity scale.
Those may not be household names, but you are most likely familiar with the terms associated with them. Saffir-Simpson is where we get the "Category 1 Hurricane" ranking from, and Fujita is where you get the "F-5" tornado" classification from. Cali has the earthquakian Richter Scale.
New England sort of ranks poorly with these rubrics. We get very few tornadoes when compared to, say, Kansas. That's why Dorothy was a farm girl instead of a lobsterman's daughter. Although we are nautical and have a hurricane scored in the higher percentile of the rankings, Florida has several storms ranked ahead of the worst storm Massachusetts ever got hit by. I'm pretty sure that a California wildfire doesn't even get on the news until it burns an area the size of Plymouth County.
They won't do it when we're watching, but you get a sense that other states might talk about us being Weather Wimps.
We do have one area that we rule, albeit as a small part of a sprawling Meglopolis. The NESIS (North East Snowfall Impact Scale) is a ranking system designed for high-impact snow events. Other regions have similar scales, but the population of the Northeast generally wins us the title.
It uses a complicated rubric that, if I am simplifying it properly, takes Snowfall Total, Area Of Snowfall, and Population Impacted By The Event and works a score from them.
It's a tricky scale. For starters, I don't even know how to read that Good Will Hunting math that they're using.
(Readers should know that I took only one math class during my college days... Prob and Stat. I scored an A on my first quiz, then a B, then a C, then a D, then a series of Fs. I never missed a class, always took part in the lessons, and did my homework, so I was hanging around C- when the final exam was scheduled. I'm just not that smart, especially if you don't count Creativity as a form of Intelligence.
On the day of the final exam, a man was maimed at the factory I was working at to put myself through college. It sort of fell on me to save the man's life. OSHA sent a shrink down to counsel the people who witnessed the bloody accident. When I told her that I had a Stat final in a few hours, she wrote a very good note for my professor.
When I gave the note to the Professor, he looked at it, looked at me (I went to the class right from the factory, and still had blood on me), looked at his grade book, and asked me "Are you planning on working for NASA or anything brainy like that?" When I told him I wasn't, he opened his wallet, gave me $10, and said "Go home, get a six pack, don't worry about the test, you'll get a B for the term."
Anyhow, that's why I don't know what that E thing in the math equation is. I think it means Epsilon, and has something to do with fraternities.)
Minnesota (once you get away from Lake Superior's moderating effect) has far snowier winters than we do. Boston complained for 3 months about a winter that barely gave us 100 inches of snow. Minnesota has had 170 inches of snow fall on it in a winter.
You'd think that Minnesota would score wildly on NESIS... but nobody lives in Minnesota. OK, about five million people live there, so "nobody" might be unfair. However, the Greater Boston Metropolitan Area also has about 5 million people, and you could fit 50 Greater Bostons into Minnesota's land area.
So, Minnesota wastes a 40 inch snowstorm on a few thousand people who were already isolated before the storm. Boston, however, gets maximum misery out of every snowflake.
When I look at NESIS, the sportswriter in me immediately thinks "Quarterback Ratings." Saffir-Simpson is like the Home Run leader in baseball. Babe Ruth hit 714 home runs. That means that he hit 714 balls that either left the park or caused such confusion staying in the park that Babe was able to cover 4 bases with that 1920s newsreel speed-waddling he used. Saffir-Simpson is easy like that.
Fujita is the same. Got the wind speed? Look at the Fujita chart. There's your answer. No math, as Roberto Duran once didn't say.
NESIS is like the QB ratings in the NFL. I was one of AOL's main football writers for several years, and I have no idea how they figure out QB rankings. There's an answer somewhere, but I'm not interested in anything that ends in 158.3. If you're arguing Quarterback Merit in a bar and you say "So and So has a 137.6 rating, while your guy only has 121.9," the answer you get should be a big fist slamming into your nose.
Rather than coming up with some fancy term like "Category 3 hurricane" or F-4 Tornado," they have 5 grades:
Notable
Significant
Major
Crippling
Extreme
There are some flaws to NESIS.
Wind Speed doesn't seem to be a factor, nor does Coastal Flooding. Everyone in Massachusetts remembers the Blizzard of '78, but fewer people remember the storm a few weeks before the Blizz which dropped 10-20" from Maine to West Virginia. The Blizzard, which was a far more devastating storm that touched a smaller land area, ranks lower than her January of '78 sister storm.
The list seems to have some notable exclusions. I don't see any Winter 2015 action there, although I may have an old article I'm using for my stats (Ed. note: his list is from 2010). March of 1993 was the worst storm they ranked, but we got a measly 10 inches out of that one, as the heavy snowfall fell elsewhere.
New England also loses out on this list a lot because some of our more notable storms are either nor'easters which form just off of our shores and drop White on only us, or they are storms which pass out to sea by most of the US before clipping us. Some large snowfalls that only hit Cape Cod would fail to make the list over Population reasons, even if they were worse storms than milder ones which hit a lot of people.
NESIS also sounds like the acronym for a bunch of Muslims that Donald Trump wants to kill, but we're starting to drift away from the Science.
Some of the top snowstorms in US history that touched Eastern Massachusetts:
- March 1956, late season storm does 10-20" in MA, NYC and Long Island
- February 1958, 10-20" for all of New England, snow in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi
- December 1960, 10-20" from Maine to the Old Dominion
- February 1961, 10-20" in MA, 3 feet in upstate NY
- January 1964, a Category 4 ("Crippling") does 10-20" in MA
- January 1966, I think Buffalo got buried by previously-fallen snow blowing off a frozen Lake Erie.
- February 1967, 10-20" snow hit New England with monster-truck force.
- February (8-9) 1969, 20" across Massachusetts, even NYC... had a worse storm 2 weeks later.
- February (22-29) 1969, 3 feet in all of Maine and NH, 20" all over MA
- January 1978, 20+", This snow was still on the ground when the Blizzard of '78 hit.
- February 1978, speaking of the Blizzard....
- April (6-7), 1982, late season storm, 10-20" west of 495
- February 1983, I-95 special
- January 1987, Cape Cod is the northern fringe of a storm that made it snow in both Carolinas.
- March 1993, Cat. 5 (Extreme), 30" from Vermont to Tennessee, the highest ranked NESIS storm
- February 1994, 20-30" of snow hitting the Cape, the South Coast and South Shore
- January 1996, #2 on the list as of 2010
- April 1997, the April Fool's Day Blizzard
- February 2003, 10-20" in Plymouth County
- January 2005, 3 feet of snow in EMass, the most snow I've personally seen fall.
- February 2007, snow from MA to Texas
- February 2010, snowstorm touches 20+ states, one of three Major storms in a month
- February 2013, The start of our current run.
- January-March, 2015... I sort of count it as one big Event.
- January 2016, a Cat. 4 (Crippling), set NYC's all-time record, 10-15" on Cape Cod
Notes:
- There wasn't an impact storm 9 months before my birthday, nor Jessica's.
- I do not believe that the list goes back before 1956, most likely due to population growth with the Baby Boom. The Blizzard of 1888 would have topped this list if it hit when NYC had 10 million people.
- Eastern Massachusetts gets little lulls, like the early 1970s, most of the 1980s, and the early-mid 1990s. We've been getting fairly regular impact events since 2003 or so.
- I assume that these lulls were periods where the Heat Miser was winning his mano y mano with the the Cold Miser. Southeastern Massachusetts, and especially Cape Cod, is sort of a buffer zone between the two rivals... sort of a Boston accented Latvia. The Cold Miser has been dominating lately.
- February of 1969 and January-February 1978 rivaled the January-March 2015 snow blitz for a few storms, but the winters then ran out of gas. 2015 had staying power.
- I can dig up info on the post-2010 storms, perhaps even rank them, but they won't have handy maps.
- The two worst NESIS-ranked storms up until 2010 (1993 and 1996) just grazed us, relatively. March 1960 is the highest Eastern Mass ranks on this NESIS list.
