Cellphones around the New York region began buzzing with an emergency alert from the National Weather Service at 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday: “Snow Squall Warning til 4:15 p.m. EST. Sudden whiteouts. Icy Roads. Slow Down!”
At about 4 p.m., phones were buzzing again. The warning had been extended until 5:30 as the squalls moved quickly across the region, creating potentially dangerous driving conditions in three states.
Just after the second alert was issued, the snow and wind — in gusts of up to 30 miles per hour — were swooping into New York City from the east, turning what had been a chilly, gray day into something more raw as the sunlight quickly faded away.
Among other things, the warnings prompted many people to ask: What is a snow squall?
The National Weather Service describes a snow squall as “an intense short-lived burst of heavy snowfall that leads to a quick reduction in visibilities and is often accompanied by gusty winds.”
On Twitter, Merriam-Webster offered its own definition: “a sudden violent wind often accompanied by rain or snow.”
A time-lapse video posted on Twitter by Brian Stelter of CNN captured the intensity with which the squall hit Manhattan.
The fierce winds and decreased visibility caused arriving flights at Newark Liberty International Airport, Kennedy International Airport and La Guardia Airport to be delayed, according to the F.A.A.
By around 4:45 p.m., the squall had blown through New York and was on its way to Long Island, leaving just under a half-inch of snow in Central Park, the National Weather Service said. The snow started at 4:06 and had turned to “just light flurries” by 4:47, the Weather Service said.
For New York residents accustomed to their phones humming with Amber Alerts about missing children and weather advisories about flash flooding, being told to watch out for short, powerful blasts of snow felt like something new.
Sort of.
The warnings issued on Wednesday were only the second and third such alerts to be pushed out in the New York area since the National Weather Service decided snow squalls posed a serious enough threat to be added last year to the small number of weather events worthy of an emergency alert. (The first squall alert in the region was issued in January.)
The Weather Service’s parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, announced in January 2018 that it was introducing snow squall alerts nationwide primarily to help prevent deadly car crashes.
“Snow squalls can easily cause large highway pileups, capable of multiple fatalities, due to their brief but heavy snowfall, low or no visibility, and slick road surfaces,” the agency said in a news release.
The agency said it was introducing the warnings because a new weather satellite and other technological improvements were helping to “identify snow squalls and other localized short-term weather events, such as thunderstorms and tornadoes, as they develop.”
Carrie Buccola, a National Weather Service meteorologist in New York, noted that social scientists from the agency who had studied how to share urgent information with the public had played a role in deciding to use cellphone alerts for snow squalls.
“They can be life-threatening,” she said of the squalls.
The squall alerts came a day after an Amber Alert about a missing 16-year-old girl captured New Yorkers’ attention. The girl, who appeared to have been kidnapped while walking with her mother in the Bronx late on Monday, turned up unharmed on Tuesday. Later, the girl confessed to the authorities that the kidnapping was a hoax stemming from her difficult relationship with her mother, according to two police officials.
In addition to Amber Alerts and alerts meant to warn of severe weather and other potential threats, there is a third category: those sent by the president to warn about a national catastrophe. The first nationwide test of a presidential alert was conducted in October 2018.
The system has been criticized on several fronts in recent years. Officials from the Houston area and California, among others, have complained about an inability to target precisely the areas where the alerts are sent.
What may be the system’s most notable failure occurred in January 2018, when the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency sent a false alert about an incoming ballistic missile that plunged the state into panic and chaos for 38 minutes. A worker at the state’s emergency command post was blamed for the mistake.
Michael Gold contributed reporting.
