Page:The National geographic magazine, volume 1.djvu/55

 different observers, which go to show that 40 inches or more of snow fell over the greater part of the districts named.

The deepening of the area of low pressure and the augmentation of the cold high area advancing from British America resulted in barometric gradients of unusual intensity; there be ing gradients in excess of 6, when gradients of 5 rarely occur either in the United States or Great Britain. The high winds caused by these unusual gradients had the effect of drifting the snow to an unusual extent, so that, as is well known, nearly every railroad in New Jersey, Connecticut, New York, and Massachusetts was snow-bound; the earliest and most prolonged effects being experienced in Connecticut, which doubtless received the full benefit of the heavy snowfall in the Hudson River valley in addition to that in the western part of that State.

It is thought by some that the storm re-curved and passed northwest into Connecticut; an opinion in which I cannot concur. The international map and reports tend to show that this storm passed northeastward and was on the Banks of Nowfoundland on the 17th of March. The peculiar shape of the isobars, while the storm could be clearly defined from observations at hand, was such that it is not unreasonable to believe that the change of wind to the south at Block Island was due simply to an off-shoot of the storm from the main centre, in like manner as the storm itself was the outgrowth of a previous depression.

The track of this storm across the sea is left to Professor Hayden. These remarks are necessarily imperfect, as my official duties have been such as to prevent any careful study or examination of the storm apart from that possible on the current weather maps of the Signal Service.