‘Bomb’ blizzard buried cars and homes with more than 12 feet of snow in parts of Newfoundland

Global warming has caused an increase in the amount of water vapor in the air, leading to an increase in the number and severity of severe precipitation events.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/01/18/newfoundland-historic-snow-blizzard/


By Andrew Freedman and
Hannah Knowles
January 19 at 1:13 PM

The historic blizzard that slammed Canada’s easternmost province is headed for Greenland — but it left snow-buried neighborhoods, a slew of power outages and shattered records in its wake.

St. John’s superseded its record for the most snow in 24 hours, recording 30 inches, as the storm hit Newfoundland and Labrador on Friday. A state of emergency continued in the provincial capital and elsewhere through Sunday as most businesses were ordered closed and few beyond emergency vehicles were allowed on the roads. Snow drifts rose 12 to 15 feet high on some highways, officials said. The Canadian armed forces were called in to help clear the deluge.

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St. John’s International Airport measured 30 inches of snowfall Friday, its snowiest single day in records dating to 1942. The previous record of 26.9 inches was set in April 1999. Totals in other areas were higher, and wind speeds of 100 mph or greater made it difficult to measure the snow amid blowing and drifting.

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While the storm was relatively short in duration, it was unusually ferocious even for an area used to powerful ocean storms during the winter — “as severe a blizzard as St. John’s metro has ever seen,” tweeted one meteorologist, the Weather Network’s Chris Scott, who placed the tempest “in an elite class with some of the most infamous nor’easter/Atlantic seaboard storms ever.”

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tags: severe weather, extreme weather