What’s a nor’easter?

You know when one is about to hit. Grocery stores swell with shoppers stocking up on bottled water and canned goods. Municipal snowplows make preemptive sanding runs through the quiet streets. Nothing sends North Country folks into a tizzy quite like a good nor’easter. What is it that makes these unholy blizzards that blow from the wrong way so powerful?

Nor'easter image courtesy of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Nor’easters are known to bring enormous amounts of precipitation and wind gusts upwards of 50 miles per hour. In the winter, which seems to be most of the time here, all of that wind and rain translates into a lot of snow and ice. A nor’easter is basically a wet and windy storm that blows up the East Coast. Although these storms can occur anytime of year, the prime season is from September to April when frigid artic air blows southeast from the Canadian plains and meets northbound warm air on the Gulf Stream. This collision of warm and cold air masses creates a cyclonic storm off the coast that equates to the winter version of a tropical storm.

These storms occur often and usually aren’t very strong, but when they do get big, they can pack a wallop. Burlington is still digging out from the nearly 3 feet of snow it picked up in early January, but that was an isolated total. Most of the Adirondacks got only 6 inches so.

Most storms occur as the result of warm and cool air masses collide, and the more extreme the difference between temperatures of the air masses, the more powerful the storm. We just happen to live in a part of the world where extremely cold air blows down from Canada to collide with warm air moving up the East Coast.