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Tuesday, January 21, 2014 - 1:15pm


Updated: 2 years ago.
Here we go again. Earlier this month in St. Louis, Jerome Harris bundled up against frigid temperatures. Now, cold air is again rushing south from the Arctic and a "bomb" of a storm is brewing across much of the eastern half of the nation.





So what is it?

Well, as Bolaris says, it's a "rapidly intensifying storm." The conditions that set one off: According to, "bombogenesis typically occurs between a cold continental air mass and warm ocean waters or between a cold polar air mass and a much warmer air mass."

Those air masses mix together to form an "extratropical surface cyclone" or, as in this case, a "bomb" of a storm.

Cyclones, as we've said, are "rotating storms spawned in the tropics." An "extratropical cyclone," though, has cold air at its core and can form over land or water, as The Weather Underground says. Bombogenesis also draws its name from another weather term cyclogenesis which is basically a fancy word for a cyclone's origin.

This bombogenesis blather comes, of course, because of what's expected to happen today from the Mid-Atlantic up into New England. There's going to be "moderate to locally heavy snow from the central Appalachians to southern New England, including all of the Mid-Atlantic region," the National Weather Service says. The storm and the "bomb" are being fueled by another blast of cold air from the North that's running into warmer air coming up from the South.




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