Spring may be only two weeks away, but Mother Nature has her own plans, and a significant swath of the United States and Canada is likely to get snow beginning on Thursday.
According to AccuWeather, frigid Arctic air is about to collide with warm air from the Gulf of Mexico over the Great Plains. The Jet Stream will continue to ram cold air into this situation and push the storm to the northeast, bringing snow and thunderstorms as far as Canada’s Maritime Provinces by the beginning of next week.
The convergence of forces is expected to create a situation called “explosive cyclogenesis,” in which the atmospheric engine that drives storm creation would go into overdrive, rapidly strengthening into a cyclone with powerful winds and heavy precipitation in just a matter of hours. The storm this dynamic produces is called a “bomb cyclone.”
The National Weather Service has issued Winter Storm Warnings and Winter Weather Advisories stretching from Denver, Colorado, to Kansas City, Missouri, for Thursday, where as many as six inches of snow could fall.
The storm will then bring snow to Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle before striking the Ozark Plateau, the Ohio River valley, and the Appalachian Mountains, where winds will get even stronger, reaching 40 to 60 miles per hour, or roughly tropical storm-strength. The storm’s arrival will see a quick decline in temperatures, falling by several dozen degrees Fahrenheit in a couple of hours, according to the Washington Post.
By Friday night, the storm is expected in New England. The storm's outer bands could bring damaging winds and rain to the more temperate parts of the East Coast as well, as areas close to the Atlantic coastline are expected to be spared of the coldest weather. By Saturday, snow is expected in the Great Lakes region and on Sunday, the storm could cross into Maine and Quebec.
Big winter storms are by no means unheard of in eastern North America, where Spring’s earliest flowers are already poking out. The 1993 Storm of the Century, which brought destruction and chaos from Cuba to Canada, also formed in mid-March. That cyclonic storm killed 318 people and dumped several feet of snow and ice across the continent.
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