The Last Northeast Blizzard of 2010

Monday 7:30 AM

The blizzard that bashed the Northeast is ending from southwest to northeast today, but it has been an awesome storm (awesome... that's a word you don't hear too often). Top accumulations have been around two and a half feet in northeast New Jersey. There was a sharp western edge to the heavy snow, with areas west of I-81 getting virtually nothing from Maryland northward. The central pressure in the storm was as low as in some hurricanes, and the winds gusted to 40-70 mph at spots from New Jersey northeastward along the New England coast.

The area around New York City was probably the hardest hit. Based on the water equivalent of around 2 inches, the snow in the city (315 square miles) weighed 91,680,906,240 pounds!. On a 10-foot by 10-foot section of driveway, the snow weighs a little over half a ton.

Now, as the storm departs, the overall weather pattern is changing. The flow aloft will become southwesterly, and temperatures will reach the 40s in Boston on Thursday and Friday. It will warm past 50 degrees in Pittsburgh. A cold front that reaches Chicago at the end of the week will reach the East Coast at the end of the weekend, but we see no return of the persistently cold weather that has been common most of this month.