At 2:45 p.m. Wednesday, students were walking around Rutgers University’s New Brunswick campus without jackets on. It was 65 degrees, a record high — what the area would typically see in late April rather than mid-February.
A little more than 12 hours later, though, there was snow on the ground, the first taste of a storm that would blanket much of New Jersey with 6 to 12 inches of fresh powder.
It may be the first time in history (the verdict remains out) that this kind of extreme contrast occurred in such a short time period in New Brunswick, but experts say the wild swings in temperature and precipitation are far from unheard of in the winter months.
Cold air arrived just in time Thursday.WeatherBell
“It’s pretty remarkable,” said David Robinson, the state climatologist at Rutgers University, who keeps thorough records of historical New Jersey meteorological data. “We’ve seen things like this before. Think of the Meadowlands Super Bowl. If you remember, temperatures were well into the 50s that night and then the next day people had trouble getting out of Newark because there was 6 to 8 inches of snow. This is a bit more dramatic.”
It may have been dramatic, but the processes that allowed such a swing to occur are perfectly natural.
“It is just sort of the nature of the beast with weather generally,” said Sam DeAlba, a meteorologist with Hackettstown-based WeatherWorks.
In fact, just the day before our balmy Wednesday, parts of New Jersey were under a freezing rain advisory as another storm system glanced the state.
That disturbance helped drag a warm front through the area, creating a ridge in the jet stream that allowed warm air to surge into the region from the south.
Right on its heels, though, was the disturbance that birthed our snowstorm, riding along a trough in the jet stream that had dipped down into the central United States.
“You’ve got a ridge to the east and a trough to the west,” Robinson said. “Overnight (Wednesday), that trough shifted east and that allowed cold air to filter into the region. Right there at the bottom of that “U” is where our storm developed. With such pronounced temperature differences, you had the ideal environment for a storm system to develop.”
The interaction of warm and cold air, combined with the abundant moisture from the Atlantic Ocean helped the storm rapidly intensify off New Jersey’s coast.
As it did, the storm helped its own case for cold too.
“It turned into a big, powerful storm,” DeAlba said. “We like to say these storms can generate their own cold air just because the precipitation is so heavy. It just manages to cool everything down and allow rain to change over to snow.”
This atmospheric ballet plays out on a daily basis across the United States, we just tend to only notice when it’s punctuated by a significant event, like a snowstorm.
“This isn’t that memorable of an event for us in terms of snow,” Robinson said. “But what’s amazing is when you think about how (Wednesday) the students (at Rutgers) were walking around without jackets on, now school’s closed because of snow. That might be what helps people remember this one.”
Stephen Stirling may be reached at sstirling@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @sstirling. Find him on Facebook.
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