NEW YORK—Swirling across the Northeast on March 14, Stella was a textbook winter storm. Five days in advance, meteorologists saw it coming as two storms, one in the Midwest and one in Southeast, set on collision course.
The storms didn’t actually run into one another. As the Midwestern storm rotated, it spurred on the Southeastern one, making it “extremely powerful in a matter of hours,” said Keith Seitter, executive director of the American Meteorological Society. “That’s kind of the classic setup for a really strong nor'easter.”
Yet when Stella came to the northeast, instead of dumping the predicted foot of snow in New York City, it sprinkled just seven inches on the city, and two feet in parts of Pennsylvania.
The dividing line between a sprinkle of snow and a pile of snow can be as thin as a few miles.
