BOSTON – We’ve all heard the stories about the Blizzard of 1978 and perhaps you have one of your own. Even 46 years later, it still stands as the “benchmark” storm in New England, the storm against which all other are compared.
Tuesday, on the 46th anniversary, instead of reliving the storm once again or digging through the impressive numbers, it’s time to give an answer to a question that the WBZ-TV weather department gets frequently.
Could a storm like the Blizzard of ’78 happen again today? And what would it look like?
Looking back on the Blizzard of ’78
To start, I think it is important to remember how different things really were back in 1978.
Weather forecasting in the 70s was still in its relative infancy. There was essentially one computer model for meteorologists to look at along with some very crude satellite imagery. So, as you can imagine, forecasts were not always very accurate.
Because of this, the public had very little faith in meteorologists. There were some brilliant on-air meteorologists back then from Don Kent to Barry Burbank to Harvey Leonard, but they were severely hamstrung by the minimal data that was available to them at the time.