Forget About White Christmas!  How About A White Halloween!!

It has been a wild and crazy ride with the weather in New Jersey since September 2010.  The latest chapter occurred over this past weekend when a nor’easter brought record snowfall to the Garden State as well as many other locations in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic United States.  The storm brought record snow and power outages to many locations in New Jersey.

Earlier in the week, there had been talk of possible snow in New Jersey.  By Friday, that talk was becoming reality as a powerful coastal storm that had dumped snow in the Colorado Rockies earlier in the week, was coming up the coast.  Forecasts originally called for either 1 to 3 inches, or 2 to 4 inches here in Northwestern Middlesex County as well as many locations in the easternmost counties of New Jersey.

However, areas farther west such as Sussex, Warren, Morris, and Hunterdon Counties were looking at 4 to 6 inches.  Philadelphia was expected to get 3 to 5 inches while Allentown, Pennsylvania was looking at 6 to 10 inches.  Getting out to a high school football game on Friday night, I didn’t get the feeling that there would be a lot of snow.  Although I had dressed warmly, I didn’t wear any gloves, and it didn’t affect me since temperatures were comfortable with little wind.

Another thing that startled me about this storm was the fact that the pressure wasn’t that low.  At the height of the storm, the barometer only dropped to 29.83 inches, or 1010 millibars, which is quite high for such a powerful storm.  The pressure was only as low as a strong tropical depression, or minimal tropical storm.  However, the low stayed just far enough offshore to bring in enough cold air to tap into plenty of moisture.  Approximately one to two inches of rain fell along the Jersey Shore.  Translate that to snowfall, we could have had 10 to 20 inches of snow.

Some locations across New Jersey did see a plentiful amount of snowfall.  The winner was West Milford in Passaic County with 19 inches of snow.  Marcella, New Jersey received 15.5 inches of the white stuff.  Here in South Plainfield, there was only about 3 inches of snow while in nearby Edison, there was 4 inches of snow.  Woodbridge had over 5 inches.  The grand winner was Plainfield, Massachusetts in the western part of the state, which received just under 28 inches of snow.  Parts of Connecticut received over 20 inches of snow.

It didn’t really matter how much snow any of these towns received.  There were two reasons for that.  First, there had only been three previous recorded instances of snow in the New York City area since the Civil War with the last occurrence being in 1952.  The earliest significant snowfall in Northwestern Middlesex County was back in November 1989 when six inches of snow fell on the day after Thanksgiving.  The highest recorded snowfall in New York City before Saturday was 0.8 inches.  The second reason was because the snow was so wet and heavy that it had a devastating effect on trees and power lines.

Within the first hour of the snowfall, trees began snapping and falling in South Plainfield as well as other locations in New Jersey, especially as you got further north and west.  With leaves still  on the trees and the wet snow, tree branches and limbs gave way to the weight on them.  Trees that didn’t break were bent to the extreme.  The result was massive power outages.  Power went out to many on the north side of town in South Plainfield around 1:30 PM in the afternoon.  A total of 750,000 customers lost power in Connecticut while another 600,000 lost electricity in New Jersey.  Southeastern New York had about 65,000 people without power.

Snow that made it to the ground combined with sleet in a lot of places to make the ground very slippery and slushy.   The snowfall caught a lot of residents in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast unprepared.  The combination of the wet and slushy snow along with 30 to 40 mile per hour winds, and cold temperatures that dropped at or below freezing made life miserable for many, who were surprised by the sight of snow in October.  The intensity of the snowfall appeared to also have forecasters perplexed and confused.

Early in the morning, the National Weather Service Office in Mount Holly was calling for 2 to 5 inches in Northwestern Middlesex County.  Accu-Weather also called for about 2 to 4 inches.  The National Weather Service Office in Upton, New York called for 5 to 8 inches in Newark, and 6 to 10 inches in Somerset County.  Plainfield in Union County was under a Winter Storm Warning while South Plainfield in Middlesex County, just minutes away from the Union County border, was under a Winter Weather Advisory.  Within six hours that would change as Middlesex County was blitzed by heavy snow after the changeover from rain occurred around 11:00 AM EDT.

In the end though, the Mount Holly office ended up more on the mark with its forecast than Upton did.  However, having two NWS offices in the same geographic area giving such diverse forecasts for locations just five minutes apart was a bit disturbing.  Power outages in South Plainfield left many homes and businesses in the dark along the Plainfield Avenue corridor from Maple Avenue northward.  Electricity left those residents in the dark until just before sunrise on Monday morning.  However, there were many other Jersey residents still without power well into the early part of this week.  As of Wednesday, there were still 70,000 residents without power in New Jersey.

While much of the snow melted on Sunday, temperatures dropped to record levels on Monday morning to keep the snow on the ground a little longer, especially in areas north and west.  Many Schools in Hunterdon, Morris, Passaic, Sussex, and Warren counties were closed.  It was a memorable storm something that may be a once in a century occurrence.  However, in a year of weather extremes for the Garden State, this storm was the norm, not the exception.