'Snow King' Blizzard, Arctic outbreak still unmatched 123 years later

‘Snow King’ Blizzard, Arctic outbreak still unmatched 123 years later
One of the worst blizzards in U.S. history is not only infamous for unloading nearly a yard of snow in the mid-Atlantic, but extreme cold that has yet to be repeated, including sub-zero temperatures in Florida.

Nor’easters, bomb cyclones and blizzards are some of the words used to describe powerful East Coast snowstorms, but more than a century ago, a storm of colossal proportions blasted the region and solidified its place in history as the Snow King.

The Snow King, also known as the Great Blizzard of 1899, embodied the term “historic” with snowfall totals and extremely low temperatures that are still etched in record books across the country to this day.

The predecessor of the National Weather Service, the Weather Bureau, called it “a snowstorm of unprecedented severity in the Middle Atlantic States” that was accompanied by “a freeze that for duration and severity stands unparalleled.”

The everyday life in America when the storm hit was significantly different than it is today with the 1899 blizzard arriving four years before the Wright Brothers took flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and nine years before the Ford Model T was manufactured for the masses.

The wrath of the blizzard pummeled the mid-Atlantic between Feb. 11 and Feb. 14, 1899, with 20 to 30 inches of snow accumulating from central Virginia to western Connecticut, including 20.5 inches in the nation’s capital. This still stands as the second-biggest snowstorm to hit Washington, D.C., behind only the Knickerbocker storm of 1922. Cape May, New Jersey, recorded nearly a yard of snow, with 34 inches piling up in the popular beach town.

Snow drifts turned into mountains taller than the horses and carriages that tried to navigate the 19th-century streets, causing virtually all transportation across the region to shut down.

The mammoth blizzard spread snow far beyond the mid-Atlantic with snow reported as far south as Fort Myers, Florida. As much as 3 inches of snow accumulated in the Florida Panhandle with enough snow piling up in Tallahassee for residents to have snowball fights.

As impressive as it was, the monster snowstorm almost seems like a footnote compared to what unfolded in the wake of the storm.

The term “polar vortex” does not exemplify the severity of the brutally frigid air that engulfed North America behind the blizzard, an invasion of cold weather that became known as the Great Arctic Outbreak of 1899.

The extremity and duration of the cold sound more like fiction than fact with icy air initially sinking across the western United States on Feb. 4 and maintaining an icy grip on the country through the middle of the month.

Sub-zero temperatures were reported in all 45 states across the U.S., including a teeth-chattering 2 degrees below zero F in Tallahassee. This is the only time in recorded history that the temperature dipped below 0 F anywhere in the Sunshine State.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Weather Bureau Weather Map for Feb. 13, 1899, shows a large low-pressure system bringing snow from South Carolina to Maine, with temperatures in the Florida Panhandle dipping into the teens and the freezing line (32 F) two-thirds of the way through Florida.

All-time low temperatures that were set in towns across the central and eastern U.S. during the Great Arctic Outbreak of 1899 still stand more than a century later.

The mercury plummeted to 61 degrees below zero F in Fort Logan, Montana, the lowest temperature recorded during the historic chill. This was just 9 degrees shy of the lowest temperature ever measured in the contiguous U.S. set in Medicine Lake, Montana, on Jan. 20, 1954.

Temperatures of 20 to 30 degrees below zero were common across the Nation’s Heartland with the widespread, long-duration cold creating a phenomenon that has been witnessed only a handful of times.

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