Over a foot of wet heavy snow fell at Bradley Field near Hartford CT, the biggest October storm ever there. Trees are down everywhere creating outages and dangerous roads. It was a warm October. Leaves were still on trees when the storm hit. Thus the snow buildup on branches was more than normal because of the extra weight of snow on the leaves.
In many cases, the storm has already caused more damage and power outages in some towns than Irene. In the Farmington Valley, for example, 100 percent of the Connecticut Light and Power Company customers were without power Saturday night and into Sunday morning.
I grew up near there and don’t ever recall a storm that knocked out power so completely in such a large area, and certainly not before Halloween.
It’s really rather simple: contributions of the ever diminishing polar icecap and the massive melt-off of the Greenland glaciers are dumping super cold super heavy water into the North Atlantic, collapsing the North Atlantic Conveyor. The North Atlantic Conveyor is the current of warm surface water and air that travels up (North) along the eastern coast of of “Americaâ€, across the Atlantic above Iceland and then down the western coasts of Europe, a current of warm surface water and air that has kept the North “American†eastern seaboard and Northern Europe habitable these past twelve thousand years. Before that, not so much… soon, Northeastern “America†and Northern Europe may again become uninhabitable.
We have seen this in the geological record, we can read it both in ice cores and sea bed cores. When the ice dams broke at what is now Hudson’s Bay and carved out the St. Lawrence Seaway, it collapsed the conveyor, and what we see now is virtually identical. It has happened before, and it is happening again, and both events are/were the direct result of atmospheric warming.