Windswept_ The Story of Wind and Weather - Marq de Villiers [39]
We woke up to a howling wind and heavy snow. It snowed all day. It blew all day. It snowed all night. It blew all night. Shutters banged, trees cracked, the entire landscape seemed to groan in pain. Below the irritant of the banging shutters there was a constant basso roar, as the wind-born waves hurled themselves at our rocky beach. I wasn't worried they'd come over the rampart—only the rare hurricane causes that—but it still sounded like an express train going by at high speed. I seemed to feel the bedrock shaking, though I knew it was my imagination. Out on Sable Island, which was nothing but sand, the giant waves literally did make the whole island quiver, but here . . .
On top of the roar of the waves and the clattering shutter was the sound of the wind gusting in the spruces, varying in pitch from a howl to a whine. On the morning of the nineteenth, it was still snowing, the wind still blowing, visibility only a few yards. The storm had slowed down. It was not quite stalled, but it was now centered over Sable Island, a hundred miles to our east, and was drifting in a leisurely way to the northeast. We had maybe three feet of snow on the ground, swirled around and piled high in drifts. I couldn't see the cars, except for their antennas. The front door had snow piled against it well over the door handle. The back door, in a wind shadow, was completely clear, but halfway up the path the snow was over my head. Our deck was buried in a snow cover maybe four feet thick. The picnic table had disappeared entirely.
The media in the next few days took to calling the storm White Juan, in memory of Hurricane Juan, which had passed through only five months earlier. Winds during the storm were steady at 48 miles an hour, with gusts up to 75 miles an hour in exposed areas, decently into the hurricane range.11
An intense storm, but not that atypical in winter. Perhaps more snow than usual, but every year in these latitudes there are two or three storms pretty much like it.
That's really interesting about these hurricane-force winter gales is not their animus but the mundane and mechanically simple nature of their origins. The western edge of the Gulf Stream is where these storms are made. As the current snakes its way past Cape Hatteras and turns back out to sea after a close swipe at land, it mingles briefly with the cold tongues of the southbound Labrador Current. In winter, when a dome of high pressure from the Arctic drifts southeast, bringing with it vast eddies of freezing air, it may come to the edge of the Gulf Stream and stall. If a core of warm air is encountered off the coast, just east of the Gulf Stream, and if the jet stream is flowing toward the northeast, the two air masses collide, the cold air fighting to move east, the warm air prodded by the jet stream. A pocket of turbulence develops in the crook between them. Wind flows east, then is bent quickly to the north. Unable to resist the centrifugal force, it begins to move full circle, creating a system of low pressure that deepens violently.12
Because the winds are flowing counterclockwise around these storms, the winds come out of the northeast as the storms move offshore, and the fishermen just call them nor'easters. So commonplace are these violent winter storms that the load lines painted on modern ocean vessels denoting the depths to which they may safely be loaded always have as the lowest line, the lightest loading, a line marked "WNA"—Winter North Atlantic.13 Storms strong enough to severely damage large vessels happen on average about once or twice a year, particularly in the wintertime.14 Such storms happen in all the midlatitudes of the northern hemisphere. Insurance companies have tracked the damage they do; the worst in the last one hundred years was a 1953 storm that made its way to Europe, causing massive Atlantic storm surges, killing almost two thousand people. (For some of the worst winter