SNOWMABOMBAGEDDON Bonus Post

It's absolutely beautiful-looking outside and for a second this morning when I woke up and saw how sparkly a day it was out there, I thought about going out to Prospect Park to take some snow and iced-up tiny waterfall pictures, but then I looked at weather.gov, saw 11 degrees with winds gusting to 35 mph, giving a wind chill factor of -9, and decided to skip on the outside thing today. Leave out the wind and I'd probably be out there (because it IS pretty gorgeous out there!) but taken as a package it was all a bit much for this transplant from Hawai'i.

So I'm just puttering around at home, and here's the SNOWMABOMBAGEDDON bonus post. The New York Times produced a couple of nice short videos about the storm here in NYC, which I nearly added to Thursday's "Daily Commute" post, but in the end I thought they were enough for a post of their own, so here you are. If you're Facebook friends with me, you may have seen them already, I shared them there as soon as I saw them.

One's just New Yorkers being New Yorkers in exciting weather. Good fun! BTW, hit stop when it's over, the Times has these videos set up to keep going unless you do.

The other is a quick explanation of some of the terminology you saw in the media storm hype. I generally rely on NOAA's Weather.gov for solid hype-free weather forecasts for trip planning, where it's so crucial to watch how the weather is shaping up in the days leading up to a trip, and also for day to day getting around in the city. I therefore wasn't really reading a lot of the articles, but I was seeing some increasingly dramatic headlines. Paddling friend John Huntington, who is a storm chaser, knows a ton about weather, and is a very smart and rational guy, posted a good in-a-nutshell explanation of the alarming-sounding "bomb" terminology that was being used a lot:

"Also 'bombing out', which is being bandied around by the click-bait media as some sort of apocalyptic, once in a generation event just means the storm is forecast to intensify rapidly..."

The Times video expanded on that very nicely:

And here's a bonus-bomba-bonus - what does a good stormchaser do when the storm comes to him? Bundles up and gets out there, of course! John headed out to Coney Island where he got some spectacular shots. He's an excellent photographer, too, for his blizzard photos and lots of other good weather and New Yorky stuff, check out his Instagram!