A deadly 'bomb cyclone' freezes much of the country at Christmas
An Arctic blast and a rapidly intensifying storm brought blizzards and dangerous cold, with Buffalo hit especially hard.
A sprawling, rapidly intensifying winter storm gripped much of the United States in the days before Christmas, pairing a brutal Arctic outbreak with blizzard conditions and dangerous cold that stretched from the Great Lakes to the Gulf Coast, with the Buffalo area hit especially hard.
The storm underwent bombogenesis, its pressure plunging to produce powerful winds, while a blast of frigid air sent temperatures plummeting far below freezing across a huge swath of the country during one of the busiest travel periods of the year.
In western New York, the city of Buffalo endured a historic blizzard, with ferocious winds and heavy lake-effect snow producing whiteout conditions that stranded drivers and trapped residents in their homes for days. Dozens died in the region, some found in cars or snowbanks, in one of the deadliest storms in the area's history.
Elsewhere, the cold shattered records, burst pipes and strained power grids, while thousands of flights were cancelled, stranding holiday travellers across the country.
The storm was a dramatic example of how a disrupted polar vortex can unleash extreme cold far to the south, and of the compounding dangers when a deep freeze combines with a powerful, fast-strengthening storm. For Buffalo, long accustomed to heavy snow, the blizzard was nonetheless a catastrophe that tested the limits of a hardy winter city.