After last week’s megastorm that solidified the legacy of the winter of 2013-14, one meteorologist confidently pronounced: “The back of winter is broken.”
If that, indeed, is the case, those who have been shoveling the thousands of pounds of this stuff or have spent days without heat or lights likely would agree that winter is getting precisely what it deserves.
“It’s been a long, cold winter,” said Bruce Terry, senior forecaster at the government’s National Weather Center, in College Park, Md. “If you like snow, it’s a bonanza.”
A weakish snowfall Saturday accounted for an official six-tenths of an inch, tying this winter with 1898-99 at 55.4 inches, the third snowiest in the region’s history. Through Friday, 54.8 inches of snow had been measured at Philadelphia International Airport, which made it the fifth-snowiest winter in the 130-year period of record-keeping.
Jeff Masters, meteorologist at the popular Weather Underground site, and the one who claimed that winter’s back “is broken,” suspects our weather might be related to cold water immediately off the West Coast, and may have something do with worldwide warming.
Terry was more circumspect: “I don’t think we can attribute this to anything.”
Whatever the causes,
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