Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/03/14/bomb-cyclone-snowstorm-hit.html
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“Bomb cyclone?” They just made that up, right? Is 6-8 inches enough snow to justify a whole new level of alarmism?
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Because “Explosive Cyclogenesis” is just gross.
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I’m pretty sure whoever made that name up mains Zangief.
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I like the term “bombogenesis”!
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Nope. I can’t watch network news any more. I need someone to call me when they start using grammar again.
(“The mile-high city hobbled by a powerful blizzard” is not a sentence. Also, they should get off my lawn I guess)
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I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: are we sure that “Bomb Cyclone” wasn’t an end-of-level boss in one of the Mega Man games?
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That’s crazy - how could you know I was watching High Score Girl last night?
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i don’t think it’s the amount of snow – that’s not that big of a deal. but combined with winds 50-75mph, that probably justifies it.
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It was a bunch of rain that turned to snow, started freezing what was already wet, then kicked up 60mph winds on top of it all. Whole sections of Denver lost power and people were getting blown off the roads. I work for a Denver-based IT consulting company and I watched client after client go dark on our monitoring board yesterday afternoon as power failed to different parts of the city. Some still aren’t up this morning.
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Anybody else bothered by the fact that we are starting to have inland hurricanes?
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Living in Boulder, I can both confirm and deny this story. Yes, the storm was exceptional and outside the norm for Denver. We get thunderstorms, rain, wind gusts of 75 MPH, snow, hail, ice storms, and such all the time. We almost never have them all sustained within a 24 hour period. There was only 4-6 inches total here, but when you have rain at night followed by freezing temps and snow all day, what you get is 1" of ice clinging to everything. It was a real mess and the city was shut down, no exaggerations there.
But all the schools closed down the day before (which is the first time I’ve ever seen that) and most of the workplaces took the day, so there were very few people on the road. Even the normal “this isn’t a storm!” morons stayed home, so a lot less accidents and chaos than normal. Power was coming up and down all day, internet and radio was spotty. My kids and I played board games 
It was a really weird storm. Snow was sideways, sometimes coming from the North, sometimes East, and sometimes from the West. Cold AF.
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Yeah, and it was almost 60 degrees here the day before. When I got the text Tuesday evening that schools were going to be closed Wednesday, it was pretty surreal. Everyone running around without coats on, getting texts that schools and businesses were being closed the next day due to a blizzard. Ah, Colorado springtime.
And even though the storm turned out to be something of a dud in Boulder, with the brownouts and lost internet constantly throughout the day, you could feel the effect it was having very close by even though we didn’t get much.
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It was never this cold when Obama was President.
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Although, as an opening line in a novel, it’d get my attention…
I’d probably still want the editor to change it to “hobbled past a powerful blizzard” but that’s just quibbling.
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I live downtown Denver and woke up to rain in the morning. Snow started coming down around 10am and then all of sudden it was blowing sideways and knocking people off their feet. What was really different was the sheer intensity and quickness of the storm even though the amount of snow wasn’t that much. Then about 6pm it just stopped - like someone turned off the faucet. Weird.
Power was flickering on and off during the day and we lost internet connectivity. Still out this morning and I’m leeching off of the Starbuck’s next door right now.
The news reports said this was the lowest barometric pressure reading in state history with readings similar to a category 2 hurricane.
As of 9 am Wednesday the pressure reading in La Junta was 971.7 millibars, which is lower than the prior observed low. It’s also a drop of over 30 millibars in under 24 hours which more than exceeds the definition of a bomb cyclone. To be more technically correct, we refer to a storm rapidly gaining strength like this as explosive cyclogenesis.
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I will admit, I had not considered the possibility that Denver shambled past a lot of wind and snow.
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“Mile-High Mordor Hobbited by a powerful wizard.”
Howzat?
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“hobble” is also a set of restraints that can be placed (usually on a horse) to mandate a slow, or “hobbled” gait. So as far as describing a city that has been drastically slowed, or handicapped in its function, the word is just fine.
The word can be nouned, verbed, or adjectived.
I put the hobbles on my horse. Thus hobbled, he hobbled on by me.
(and I’ve just used it so many times in my head I’m not sure its a real word anymore)
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