Spring is the transition between winter’s cold and summer’s heat. Sometimes a late-season snowstorm can play a cruel joke on those ready to move on.
On April 1, 1997, 28 years ago today, a snowstorm was finishing up in the Northeast, leaving over 10 inches of wet, heavy snow from southern New England to the Hudson Valley north of New York City, Catskills and Poconos.
Boston’s Logan Airport picked up 25.4 inches of snow, their fourth heaviest snowstorm on record, and almost equal to the snow they measured for the entire 1996-97 season prior to the storm. That was accompanied by snowfall rates up to 3 inches per hour, with thunder and lightning reported, which prompted the airport to shut down from the afternoon of March 31 through late night on April 1.
The April Fools’ snowstorm set Massachusetts’ all-time 24-hour snowfall record in Milford, where 36 inches fell, according to weather historian Christopher Burt.
This combination of heavy, wet snow and wind downed numerous trees and left hundreds of thousands of customers without power. Given how fast the snow came down, plows couldn’t keep up and thousands of vehicles were stranded, prompting assistance from the National Guard to dig out some vehicles.
Prior to the storm, Boston soared to 63 degrees on March 30. That’s a scenario many in the northern U.S. are painfully familiar with in early spring.
(MORE: Major Winter Storms Can Happen In April)
April Fools’ blizzard 1997 Northeast
Jonathan Erdman is a senior meteorologist at weather.com and has been covering national and international weather since 1996. Extreme and bizarre weather are his favorite topics. Reach out to him on Bluesky, X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook.
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