On 8 and 9 February 2013, a GoPro set up in a backyard in Farmington, Connecticut, recorded the Blizzard of 2013 burying the garden. Roughly 22 hours of storm, and about 30 inches (76 cm) of snow by the filmer’s measure, are squeezed into 38 seconds of time-lapse.
The Farmington backyard time-lapse
The video was posted to YouTube by miges3111 under the title “Winter Storm Time lapse – 30" of snow in 38 seconds!”. The camera, a GoPro Hero, stays fixed on one view of the yard from Friday into Saturday morning. Because nothing moves except the weather, every fence post, step and garden object becomes a gauge: watch one of them and you can see it soften, shrink and finally vanish under the drifts.
Time-lapse works by taking a frame every few seconds or minutes and playing them back at normal speed, so a slow process like snow accumulation becomes visible as motion.
Winter Storm Nemo: the February 2013 blizzard
The storm formed when two low-pressure systems – one from the Northern Plains, one from the Texas Gulf Coast – merged off the north-eastern US coast on 8–9 February and rapidly intensified into a powerful nor’easter. The Weather Channel named it Winter Storm Nemo; it is also widely known as the Blizzard of 2013, and Hartford’s WFSB station called it Blizzard Charlotte.
Connecticut was hit hardest. Hamden recorded the storm’s highest total of 40 inches, Milford had 38 inches, and the state set a 24-hour snowfall record of 36 inches. Hartford measured 22.8 inches, its second-highest total. Elsewhere, Portland, Maine, set a single-storm record of 31.9 inches and Boston received 24.9 inches, its fifth-largest storm.
Travel bans, power cuts and wind
Governor Dannel Malloy closed Connecticut’s limited-access highways at 4 p.m. on 8 February, and the next day closed all roads to everything but essential vehicles. Massachusetts imposed its first statewide driving ban since the Blizzard of 1978. At the height of the storm about 700,000 customers lost power across nine states, gusts reached 89 mph at Mount Desert Rock in Maine and 102 mph in Nova Scotia, and at least 18 deaths were attributed to the storm.
Filming your own snow time-lapse
A fixed camera, a sheltered spot and a clear reference object are all you need. Choose a view with something of known height – a fence, a bench, a step – so the depth is easy to read, protect the lens from blowing snow, and use mains power or a large battery for a long storm. For more storms on camera, see New York’s storm from a fixed urban viewpoint and deep snow in a separate photo collection.
Related reading
- Shawn Reeder’s Yosemite Range of Light
- Lightning in Slow Motion: Branches and Bright Pulses
- Nate Bolt’s San Francisco-to-Paris Flight Time-Lapse
- Tom Gill’s Ice-Covered Lake Michigan Lighthouses
- The Ice Left by a Chicago Warehouse Fire Response
- Nickson Gensis’s Typhoon Haiyan Footage from Hernani
- Yellowknife’s Hot-Water Cloud in Extreme Cold
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