It was some of the wildest snow New England has ever seen. Bigger than the Blizzard of ‘78. And it brought Boston and much of the region to its knees.
The snow was so high for nearly four weeks in January and February 2015 that homes, schools, and businesses were buried under the heavy deluge. Homeowners used axes to chip away at their icy roofs. Residents and pets stranded in their homes had to be dug out. With nowhere to put the snow, schools were canceled. Towering snowbanks dwarfed everything in sight and Boston’s transit system came to a halt.
Snowmageddon, as it came to be called, dumped nearly 8 feet of snow between Jan. 24 and Feb. 22 that year. After a measly start to the winter, that final stretch of January propelled the Boston area to a staggering 110.6 inches of snow by the time March came to a close, making it the snowiest winter on record.
“The first storm in January, I think the most attention was out in Worcester where the totals were stacking up quickly, and in Marshfield where the storm was pounding the coast,” said Nick Emmons, who covered the storms as a news anchor and reporter for WHDH. “I remember waves crashing over houses, flooding streets, and homes encased in ice. It was just crazy.”
Former WCVB reporter Liam Martin recalls being on air “standing on top of a 10-foot snowbank because the snow was piled so high. The whole season was just unreal.” At one point, he was sent to Scituate to cover the waves crashing over the seawall. As he left town, his car “got stuck in a foot of snow on Route 228 in the middle of the night, 1:30 a.m., no one around, snow still coming down like crazy. I had to get out, dig myself out with a shovel for 30 minutes.”
One after the other, a series of unrelenting storms turned into massive snow machines 10 years ago, dumping round after round of accumulating snow.
But how did we get there? Launched by two major blizzards, one from Jan. 26-27 and another just under a week later on Feb. 2, the onslaught began. The first blizzard brought nearly 2 feet of snowfall to Boston in a single day, on Jan. 27, just shy of the all-time high for single-day snow, which stands at 26.6 inches on Feb. 18, 2003.
Two more storms that followed dumped over a foot of snow in February with a handful of other minor storms pushing through the region the rest of the season. The seasonal snowfall total at Logan Airport soared to more than twice the seasonal average.
Much colder than average air and a storm track slipping off the Mid-Atlantic coast helped sustain and strengthen the storms as they entered the region and became major snowmakers. During the last week of January, Boston’s average temperature was nearly 8.5 degrees below normal. February was much worse, with the entire month averaging nearly 13 degrees below average.
February 2015 still stands as the coldest month on record for Boston and many other New England cities.
The entire New England region and most of the country east of the Mississippi, aside of Florida, saw colder than normal temperatures that snowy winter.
Radar imagery from Jan. 27, 2015, shows intense banding, in green, across Eastern New England.
The intensity of the bands of snow were the major key to why we saw so much snow that season. Storms were able to draw moisture in from the Atlantic Ocean into an environment with exceptionally cold temperatures, which helped them evolve into intense and potent snowmakers.
And as the bitter cold air became ensconced for long stretches, the snow didn’t really melt. With sidewalks piling feet high, city trucks were forced to move loads of snow into the Charles River and to the Seaport District, where a massive snow mountain stood intact until mid-July.
“All of this cold and snow took a psychological toll,” said Globe meteorologist Dave Epstein. “My neighbor, who at the time was in her early 80s, actually hired somebody to remove the snow because she couldn’t see out her windows and was struggling with that claustrophobic feeling. I think that’s something a lot of us can relate to, the fact that it just felt like space was closing in. . . . For some, there was fear about all the snow, like the snow might not be able to melt.”
By the end of February 2015, most of New England was under 2 to 3 feet of snowpack.
It’s been 10 years and no other winter has come anywhere close to Snowmageddon, with only 2022 racking up about half that amount, seeing nearly 52 inches of snow.
These extremes in weather are a reminder of climate change’s influence. Even when our winters get colder, human-caused climate change is still very much present.
“Just because we are in a warming climate doesn’t mean that there’s not cold weather and there’s not extreme cold weather,” said meteorologist Shel Winkley. ”One of the things that we know with climate change is that the jet stream gets a little looser, and can allow for some of the cold air to come down from the top of the globe."
Surface air temperatures can be exceptionally cold and with increasing moisture in the atmosphere from warming oceans, it can spell a result like the snowy stretch of early 2015.
“For every 1 degree Fahrenheit of warming in the atmosphere, it can hold about 4 percent more moisture. In this warming globe, even in the wintertime, this supercharged water cycle allows for bigger snowfall extremes,” Winkley added.
It’s all a measure of peaks and valleys, scientists say, but the overall trend shows the planet is warming.
“It’s really easy when you’re cold and you’re seeing things like historic snow on the Gulf Coast to think, ‘What happened to climate change?’” said Winkley. ”But when you zoom out beyond the borders of the United States, you see that the rest of the globe was still exceptionally warm.”
Ken Mahan can be reached at ken.mahan@globe.com. Follow him on Instagram @kenmahantheweatherman.