Weather Bomb Threatens Boston With Heaviest Snow of the Season

(Bloomberg) -- Boston is about to get hit with a snow bomb.

A storm that's set to race up the East Coast on Thursday could drop as much as 11 inches (28 centimeters) in Boston and eastern Massachusetts, said Greg Gallina, a forecaster at the U.S. Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland.

For a winter storm to become a bomb, short for bombogenesis, the central pressure needs to drop 24 millibars or more in 24 hours. If current computer models hold, that process will start somewhere off Cape Hatteras and continue as the storm comes north. “The real apex, the peak of the storm, will be Cape Cod to Nova Scotia,” Gallina said.

On its current track, snow will scrape the East Coast and dump snow from South Carolina to Maine and into Canada, with Boston and parts of Maine bearing the brunt.

“On Long Island, out by the Hamptons and Montauk, it could be 4 to 6 inches, then we start talking about the really big numbers,” Gallina said. “The main action is the eastern third of Massachusetts.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Brian K. Sullivan in Boston at bsullivan10@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Lynn Doan at ldoan6@bloomberg.net, Stephen Cunningham, Margot Habiby

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