【1979 Archives】

It's been a long979 Archives cold weekend of hunkering down for people living in eastern Canada.

A powerful blizzard dumped a record-shattering amount of snow on the province of Newfoundland across Friday and Saturday. After moving through the northeastern U.S. at the end of the week, it developed into a powerful weather event known as a "bomb cyclone."

Meteorologists use that term to describe a kind of rapidly strengthening storm that occurs when the weather event's minimum central pressure drops by at least 24 millibars in a 24-hour period. That process of rapid intensification – "bombogenesis," as it's called – is where the "bomb cyclone" name comes from.

With this latest storm, the measured central air pressure hit 954 millibars on early Saturday morning. This amounted to a 54 millibar drop in less than 48 hours (h/t The Weather Channel). It turned into a powerful storm, with the same report pointing out that the one-day snow total in the Newfoundland city of St. John's reached 35 inches, which is close to the average snowfall the city sees across the entire month of January.

This was a bad one. It's not every day you see a professional meteorologist making a claim like this. He wasn't the only one.

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Unless you live in a very specific kind of location, you've probably never seen snowfall like this. Photos are the best way to truly grasp what Canadians are dealing with as they work now to dig themselves out, and social media has plenty to show you.

This is some wild stuff, folks.

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