Winter Storm Hercules Time-Lapse: New York City, January 2–3, 2014

Twelve and a half hours of snow, squeezed into a short clip. On the night of 2 to 3 January 2014, The Wall Street Journal pointed a camera at a New York street and let it run from about 7 p.m. until 7:30 the next morning, as the storm known as Winter Storm Hercules buried the city.

The Winter Storm Hercules time-lapse

A fixed camera is the secret of a good weather time-lapse. The buildings and street lights stay put, so every change you see comes from the storm: snow thickening on the streets and the flow of traffic changing as the night goes on. The street lights keep the scene readable all night, and the white cover grows steadily until the city looks quite different by morning.

The January 2014 nor’easter

The storm that The Weather Channel unofficially named Hercules swept across the northern United States on 2–4 January 2014. It affected roughly 200 million people.

• Snowfall: up to 2 ft fell in places, especially around Boston. The highest total was 23.8 in (60 cm) in Boxford, Massachusetts.
• Cold: Boston fell to 2 °F (−17 °C) on 3 January, with wind chills near −20 °F (−29 °C).
• Travel: airlines cancelled about 20,000 flights, and JetBlue was hit especially hard because about 80% of its flights pass through New York or Boston.
• Toll: 16 deaths were linked to the storm and the cold that followed, with damage estimated at $2.6 billion.

New York City digs out

In New York, most reports put the snowfall at around 7 inches across the city, although strong winds made it hard to measure. On the morning of 3 January, Bensonhurst in Brooklyn recorded 16 °F with a wind chill close to 1 °F. Sanitation crews ploughed the main commercial streets early that morning, subways ran on local tracks, and JFK Airport planned to reopen at 9:30 that morning after closing during the storm.

It was only the start of a snowy month. Central Park finished January 2014 with 19.7 inches of snow, 12.7 inches above average and the city’s eighth-snowiest January on record.

The cold wave that followed

As the storm moved out, an Arctic front pushed record cold across the eastern half of the country. Fort Wayne, Indiana, fell to a record −10 °F (−23 °C), and parts of Michigan dropped to around 0 °F (−18 °C). News headlines blamed the polar vortex for the deep freeze.

Other winter scenes from that season include Rostov’s huge January snowdrifts and Farmington’s February 2013 blizzard, also told in time-lapse.

Related reading

• Rostov’s January 2014 Snowdrifts: The Full Photo Gallery
• The January 2014 US Cold Outbreak: Forecasts, Observations and Winter Impacts
• Farmington’s February 2013 Blizzard in Backyard Time-Lapse
• North America’s January 2014 Cold Outbreak on a Globe
• The May 2013 Ice Shoves at Mille Lacs and Dauphin Lake
• Yellowknife’s Hot-Water Cloud in Extreme Cold

Sources