Nor’easter Misses NYC, Dumps a Foot of Snow on Boston

A powerful nor’easter delivered a glancing blow to New York City but walloped Massachusetts with more than a foot of snow.

The storm dumped between 8 and 12 inches (20 to 31 centimeters) in Boston, but the wind made it difficult to measure, said Bill Simpson, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. New York was expected to get as much as 4 inches, but snow gave way to rain by late morning and the sun was shining by 5 p.m. local time.

The storm – the third nor’easter to rake the Northeast this month – impacted travel and markets. Amtrak suspended Northeast Corridor train service between Boston and New York. The price of natural gas to be delivered Wednesday to Boston and other New England cities jumped to the highest since Feb. 12.

Airlines canceled more than 1,900 U.S. flights Tuesday, mostly in and out of Boston’s Logan International Airport, according to FlightAware, an airline tracking service. More than 180 were scrubbed at New York’s LaGuardia Airport.

Power Outages

More than 260,000 homes and businesses were blacked out in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, according to data compiled by Bloomberg from utility websites.

A March 2 storm knocked out power to more than 2 million people from Ohio to Maine and caused devastating flooding to coastal Massachusetts. Five days later, a second one dropped snow by the foot in New Jersey and across the lower Hudson River Valley.

And this may not be the last winter punch for the region, which also experienced record-high temperatures in February. Some models suggest another storm could come up the East Coast next week.

Boston and points north of New York City have as much as a 50 percent chance of ushering in the first day of spring with some sleet or even snow.

The official March 20 start to the season coincides with forecasts for low-pressure systems to form over the Ohio Valley and the mid-Atlantic, with a 30 percent to 50 percent chance of winter weather in the Northeast and New England, according to Sean Ryan, a meteorologist with the U.S. Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland. It would be the fourth winter storm to hit the Northeast since March 2 and could add to this month’s tally of thousands of grounded flights, millions of power outages and feet of snow from New Jersey to Massachusetts.

“As for how much and exactly where, that remains pretty vague at this point,” Ryan said by telephone.