A powerful, late winter storm that combines rivers of moisture and very cold weather is expected to deposit snow from the deep south of the United States to the border with Canada over the weekend, meteorologists warn.
Posted yesterday at 1:31 p.m.
Snow accumulations will vary from about ten centimeters in northern Alabama and Mississippi to about thirty in northern Maine. The storm could interfere with travel and cause power outages across a wide area of the eastern United States from late Friday through early next week.
Some are calling the storm a “weather bomb.”
“With this weather bomb, perhaps the biggest concern is that it’s arriving so late in the season and that it’s flying inland,” said Judah Cohen, a meteorologist with Atmospheric Environmental Research.
And that’s bad news for plants that think spring is already here.
Several crops and plants in the southeastern United States have started to emerge from the ground due to the mild weather. The very cold, and potentially record-breaking, temperatures expected after the weather bomb could cause severe damage, Cohen said.
A weather bomb is a storm that escalates rapidly losing pressure in a short time, i.e. at least 24 millibars in 24 hours. In this case, computer models predict that the storm will rise from around 1006 millibars in Alabama, to around 976 when it arrives in Boston, to around 960 when it crosses the Canadian border.
Several weather bombs occur each winter in the East, but they usually form over the ocean and hardly bother anyone, Cohgen said. This is the third to club the east coast this winter, he said.
“This storm is happening a little closer to land, so it’s getting a little more attention, because if it’s just a storm for the fish, we don’t really care,” Cohen said. . It’s not that unusual. »
But since it’s getting late in the season, it could very well be the last weather bomb for the Southeast, and possibly even the rest of the coast, Cohen said.
The U.S. National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning from the Deep South to northern Maine.