North American blizzard of 2006

North American blizzard of 2006

Category 2 "Significant" (RSI: 5.13)
NASA satellite image of the storm, featuring a hurricane-like "eye".
Type	Extratropical cyclone Nor'easter Blizzard Winter storm
Formed	February 11, 2006
Dissipated	February 13, 2006
Lowest pressure	971 mbar (hPa)
Maximum snowfall or ice accretion	30.2 inches (76.7 cm)
Damage	$5 million (2006 USD)
Areas affected	Virginia, Maryland, District of Columbia, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, New England, Atlantic Canada
Part of the 2005–06 North American winter storms

The North American Blizzard of 2006 was a nor'easter that began on the evening of February 11, 2006. It dumped heavy snow across the Mid-Atlantic and New England states, from Virginia to Maine through the early evening of February 12, and ended in Atlantic Canada on February 13. The major cities from Baltimore to Boston received at least a foot of snow, with a second-highest amount of 26.9 inches (68.3 cm) in New York City, the (at the time) most since at least 1869, the start of record keeping, only broken by the January 2016 United States blizzard nearly 10 years later.

Since the heaviest snow was confined to a fairly small, but very heavily populated area, the storm was only ranked as a low-end Category 3 (Major) on the new Northeast Snowfall Impact Scale, which takes into account the area and population affected, as well as snowfall accumulations. This indirectly also reflects the fact that casualties were extremely low and cleanup was fairly quick, even in the New York City area where the record snow amounts occurred. The main reasons for this are: A) The storm fell on a Sunday when many people can more easily stay home, B) the relatively small geographic area of extremely large snowfall, and C) Because the temperature was well below freezing throughout most of the storm, the snow was mostly dry and light in composition, as opposed to the wet and heavy snows that make some otherwise lesser storms much harder to clean up from and are more common at least in the coastal Northeast. Additionally, temperatures in the days after the storm were unseasonably warm in some spots (reaching the mid-50s °F in hard-hit New York City, and the mid 60s in DC) which helped melt the snow much more quickly than usual.

The storm system began developing on February 11 as a relatively minor system, bringing some snow along the southern Appalachian range. The low pressure center moved off-shore early February 12 before it began its rapid intensification. By early morning, snow began falling heavily, taking several forecasters by surprise who had expected about a foot of snow, at most, along the eastern fringes of the Atlantic seaboard. During the height of the storm on Sunday morning the 12th, thunder and lightning occurred as the snow fell. The presence of this thundersnow shows how energetic this storm became.