Blizzard

• 1. Introduction

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  A blizzard is not simply a heavy snowfall. It is a specific meteorological event defined by wind, and in the winter of 1880-81, that distinction nearly swallowed entire communities whole. Two-story farmhouses in North Dakota stood buried to their second-floor windows. Tunnels replaced streets. Trains stopped running for months. What separates a blizzard from an ordinary snowstorm is not the quantity of snow that falls but the force of the wind driving it. With sustained gusts at or above 56 kilometers per hour, snow already on the ground can be whipped into walls of white that reduce visibility to 400 meters or less. At that point, a person can lose their way ten feet from their own front door.

  The word itself has roots in sound. The Oxford English Dictionary traces "blizzard" as likely onomatopoeic, sharing its origins with "blow," "blast," "blister," and "bluster." Its first recorded use in weather dates to 1829, when it meant simply a "violent blow." By 1859 the modern meaning had taken hold in the western United States. Within two decades, the brutal winter of 1880-81 drove the term into newspaper headlines across the country and fixed it in the American imagination.

  This documentary traces the life of blizzards: how meteorologists define them, how they form, what they can do to a landscape and its people, and why some storms have carved permanent marks into history.

• 2. Defining the Storm

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  Three national agencies define blizzards differently, and the differences reveal how geography shapes meteorology. The United States National Weather Service requires sustained winds or frequent gusts of at least 56 kilometers per hour, visibility reduced to 400 meters or less by blowing or drifting snow, and duration of at least three hours. Environment Canada uses a lower wind threshold of 40 kilometers per hour but also sets a four-hour minimum. Above the Arctic tree line, Canada extends that threshold to six hours, acknowledging that polar conditions demand a stricter standard. Australia's Bureau of Meteorology focuses on temperature and wind together, describing a blizzard as a violent and very cold wind laden with snow partly raised from the ground.

  A severe blizzard, by United States standards, has winds exceeding 72 kilometers per hour, near-zero visibility, and temperatures at or below -12 degrees Celsius. Antarctica sits in a category of its own. Blizzards there are associated with winds spilling over the edge of the ice plateau at an average velocity of 160 kilometers per hour.

  A ground blizzard adds a further wrinkle. In a ground blizzard, no new precipitation is falling at all. Loose snow and ice already on the surface are lifted and driven by strong winds until visibility collapses just as completely as in any classic storm. The Blizzard of 1949 demonstrated this distinction vividly when deep drifts of 20 feet and more isolated southeast Wyoming, northern Colorado, western South Dakota, and western Nebraska for weeks, with railroad tracks and roads buried under snow that had long since stopped falling.

• 3. How Blizzards Form

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  In the United States, the jet stream is often the first actor in a blizzard's formation. When it dips far to the south, it allows cold, dry polar air from the north to collide with warm, humid air moving up from the south. That collision is the engine. When cold, moist air arriving from the Pacific crosses the Rocky Mountains and spreads onto the Great Plains, and warmer, moist air simultaneously pushes north from the Gulf of Mexico, a southward push of polar air can ignite blizzard conditions stretching from the Texas Panhandle all the way to the Great Lakes.

  The Great Plains are especially vulnerable. A broad, largely flat expanse of prairie, steppe, and grassland, it offers almost no trees or other structures to interrupt the wind. Low-pressure systems rolling off the Rocky Mountains onto this landscape can bring thunderstorms and rain to the south while delivering heavy snow and violent winds to the north. In a true whiteout, the horizon disappears entirely. Motorists must stop where they are; the road is simply invisible.

  A nor'easter, one of the more feared storm types along the Atlantic coast, forms differently. It is a macro-scale low-pressure system whose center of rotation sits just off the coast, with leading winds in the left-forward quadrant rotating onshore from the northeast. These storms can draw moisture from the Gulf of Mexico or the North Atlantic and share characteristics with hurricanes: high storm waves, coastal flooding, beach erosion, and sustained gale-force winds. The Great Blizzard of 1888 arrived as a nor'easter on March 12, dropped up to 50 inches of snow across New England and the mid-Atlantic in three days, and directly caused the creation of the New York City subway system.

• 4. The Hard Winter of 1880-81

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  October 1880 delivered a blizzard so early and so deep that farmers across the northern plains were caught completely unprepared. Fields went unharvested. Grain that had been cut sat unmilled. Woodpiles were only partly stacked. Snow accumulated not merely in drifts but as a solid mass that reached the second-floor windows of two-story houses. By January, railroad service through much of the region had nearly ceased. Companies hired crews to shovel the tracks clear, but new storms arrived faster than the men could work.

  On the 2nd of February 1881, a second massive blizzard struck and lasted nine days. In towns, the streets filled with solid drifts reaching the tops of buildings. Residents had to tunnel through snow to move at all. Farmers burrowed fragile passages through the drifts just to reach their livestock.

  When the snow finally melted in late spring, the release brought its own disaster. Massive ice jams formed on the Missouri River, and when they broke, the water downstream overwhelmed river banks. Most of the town of Yankton, in what is now South Dakota, was washed away in the flood.

  Laura Ingalls Wilder gave the season a wider audience with her children's book The Long Winter. Wilder's details were accurate: the frequency of the blizzards, the deep cold, the Chicago and North Western Railway halting trains until the spring thaw because the snow made tracks impassable, the near-starvation of townspeople, and the courage of her future husband Almanzo and another man, Cap Garland, who set out across the open prairie to find a cache of wheat that no one was even certain existed.

• 5. Storms That Redrew Maps

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  The 1972 Iran blizzard holds the grim record as the deadliest blizzard in recorded history, killing a reported 4,000 people. It dropped as much as 26 feet of snow and completely buried 200 villages. The snowfall lasted nearly a week, and when it ended, an area roughly the size of Wisconsin was buried.

  The Great Plains Blizzard of 1887 remade an entire industry. A 72-hour storm covered parts of the Great Plains in more than 16 inches of snow, with temperatures plunging to around -50 degrees Fahrenheit. The cattle that survived the cold and wind starved in its aftermath. When spring came, observers reported carcasses as far as the eye could see; dead animals clogged rivers and spoiled drinking water. Ranchers estimated that around 90 percent of the open range's cattle died. Many ranchers went bankrupt; others simply moved back east. The event became known as the "Great Die-Up" and effectively ended the romantic era of the great Plains cattle drives.

  The Schoolhouse Blizzard of January 12-13, 1888, on the North American Great Plains, was deadly for a different reason: timing. A spell of warm weather had preceded it, and people had left shelter to do chores, run errands, and attend school. When the storm hit during work and school hours, thousands were caught outside. The death toll was reported at 235, though some estimates reach 1,000. Teachers who kept children in their schoolrooms generally saved lives; exceptions nearly always resulted in disaster.

  The Storm of the Century in March 1993 offers a modern counterpoint. Forming over the Gulf of Mexico on the 12th of March 1993 and dissipating in the North Atlantic on the 15th, it stretched from Canada toward Central America at its height. Birmingham, Alabama, received up to 12 inches of snow alongside hurricane-force wind gusts and record low barometric pressure. The storm knocked out electric power to over 10 million customers in the United States and killed 310 people, including 10 from Cuba. Damage estimates ran between 6 and 10 billion dollars.

• 6. Blizzards Beyond America

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  While American history dominates the record of named storms, blizzards are a global phenomenon. The 2008 Afghanistan blizzard struck on the 10th of January 2008 with temperatures falling to -30 degrees Celsius. Snow reached depths of up to 180 centimeters in mountainous regions. At least 926 people died. The cold also claimed more than 100,000 sheep and goats; nearly 315,000 cattle died.

  The Krakatoa eruption of late August 1883 left a fingerprint on blizzard history in North America. The volcanic explosion injected an unusually large amount of sulfur dioxide gas high into the stratosphere, which reflects sunlight and cooled the planet over the following years. Weather patterns remained chaotic, and temperatures did not return to normal until 1888. The three-year period from December 1885 to March 1888 produced a series of some of the worst blizzards in United States history, concluding with the Schoolhouse Blizzard and the Great Blizzard of 1888.

  The Eastern Canadian Blizzard of 1971 dropped a foot and a half of snow on Montreal and more than two feet in the surrounding region. Its most unexpected consequence was the cancellation of a Montreal Canadiens hockey game, the first time a home game had been cancelled since 1918. Even in a country accustomed to winter, this storm stopped the nation's sport.