The big snow - Nemo arrives

So, with much fanfare, Nemo arrived yesterday. This winter storm - a classic New England nor'easter - came about with the meeting of two component storms - one moving east across the northern states which provided the cold, and a warmer system moving north easterly up from Georgia, which provided the moisture. By 4pm on Friday we had at Massachusetts-wide state of emergency, and a ban on all road travel.

Through daylight hours on Friday there wasn't much snow:

Mid morning

Lunchtime

Mid afternoon

early evening

 ...the real snow arrived overnight, and by morning the same view looked like this:

breakfast time on Saturday

snow drift above my kitchen windowsill

Our heroic 'Woods Crew' travelled along tricky roads to dig us out - principally to ensure that emergency vehicles could reach the buildings if needed. A great deal of snowblowing:

Ron with a little snowblower, tractor mounted one in the background

The view down the hill - you can see the snow-blast line from the big snowblower on the sugar maples that line the road

Since it didn't look like I was going anywhere by car...

Er, car, snow, you get the idea...

I took to the snowshoes. It will probably be a bit easier tomorrow as the snow packs down a bit. The snowshoes meant I wasn't plunging up to my knees with every step, but I was still sinking deeply, and moving quite slowly. I followed the old road through the 'woods filled up with snow', in homage to Robert Frost.

Big  footprints

woods filled up with snow, and a road less travelled...

For those of us who like the numbers, the snow is lying undrifted about 20 inches deep. Not far away in Connecticut they had nearly double that, 38 inches. The closest place that counts as having records is the city of Worcester, about 25 miles away, where they had the third highest snowfall ever. Boston had its fifth highest snowstorm total, and the highest ever single-day snowfall total. With an icy irony, the blizzard (and the Governor's edict) prevented a number of us Harvard Forest residents from travelling to Amherst, 25 miles away, for an evening watching...indoor ice hockey.

Finally, since this is my 2nd amazing storm event, I'll end with a quote from Weather Underground's Weather Historian, Christopher C. Burt:

'I might add that is a bit unsettling that two of the most significant storms in the past 300 years to strike the northeastern quadrant of the U.S. have occurred within just four months from one another.'