On This Day 33 Years Later, This Deadly Superstorm Still Defies Comparison

On March 12, 1993, a meteorologist at a Charlotte, North Carolina TV station went live on air and said something that still gets quoted today: "This is the storm... not of the century... in the history of mankind, at least as we know it... the most powerful storm to ever affect the East Coast of the United States."

He wasn't wrong. Thirty-three years later, the Storm of the Century remains in a category of its own. A storm so massive, so geographically far-reaching, and so meteorologically unusual that it has never been replicated. It produced blizzard conditions in Alabama, hurricane-force winds in New York, tornadoes in Florida, a 12-foot storm surge on the Gulf Coast, and snowfall totals measured in feet from Georgia to Maine. It affected 26 states and approximately 100 million Americans. It killed more than 300 people. And remarkably, forecasters saw it coming five days out, a landmark moment in the history of weather prediction.

How a Storm Like This Forms

The Storm of the Century wasn't born as a blizzard. It began as something far stranger — a powerful low-pressure system that developed over the Gulf of Mexico on March 12, when three independent weather patterns converged: arctic air plunging south from Canada, tropical moisture streaming in from the Gulf, and a powerful split-polar jet stream roaring overhead.