A rapidly intensifying nor’easter has brought New York City to a grinding halt, shattering records and testing the limits of one of the world’s most resilient urban infrastructures.

New York City woke up Monday buried — and still sinking. The bomb cyclone that began battering the Northeast on Sunday, February 22, has already dropped more than 13 inches of snow across the five boroughs, with snowfall rates hitting 2 inches per hour in the overnight hours and no meaningful relief in sight until late Monday afternoon.
This is not a typical winter storm. The National Weather Service issued its first Blizzard Warning for New York City since March 2017, signaling a convergence of conditions that meteorologists had been watching with growing alarm all week: sustained winds above 35 mph, visibility slashed to near zero, and a storm system powerful enough to undergo bombogenesis — the rapid, dramatic pressure drop that transforms a nor’easter into a meteorological bomb.
What Is a Bomb Cyclone — And Why Does It Matter?
The term sounds sensational, but it has precise scientific meaning. Bombogenesis occurs when a storm’s central barometric pressure falls by at least 24 millibars within 24 hours. This rapid intensification is the equivalent of a hurricane rapidly strengthening offshore — except instead of warm water feeding it, a bomb cyclone draws energy from clashing air masses along the coast. The result is an explosive escalation in wind speeds and precipitation intensity.
The 2026 nor’easter hit that threshold and kept going. By early Monday morning, the storm’s central pressure had plummeted to around 972 millibars — deep enough to generate hurricane-force wind gusts along the coast, with Montauk Point on Long Island recording an 84 mph gust. Most of the metro area saw gusts between 40 and 60 mph, enough to topple trees, knock out power lines, and make travel not just inadvisable but genuinely life-threatening.
A City Brought to Its Knees
The cascading transportation failures told the story most vividly. The Long Island Rail Road, one of the busiest commuter rail systems in the country, suspended all service system-wide starting at 1:00 AM Monday. NJ Transit halted bus service at 6 PM Sunday, followed by full rail suspension at 9 PM. Metro-North attempted to maintain limited hourly service but faced severe disruptions.
At the airports, the shutdown was near-total. JFK International canceled 82% of all Monday flights. LaGuardia Airport — already one of the region’s most weather-sensitive hubs — scrubbed 91% of scheduled departures. Newark Liberty International followed suit. Across the country, the ripple effects of the Northeast shutdown had disrupted more than 13,400 U.S. flights by mid-afternoon Sunday, with over 8,600 outright cancellations. The disruptions reached as far as Costa Rica.
On the streets, the human cost was immediate. Firefighters in Brooklyn were dispatched to multiple scenes where massive trees, their root systems destabilized by the weight and wind, had collapsed onto parked vehicles. Crews with chainsaws and ropes worked through blinding snow to free trapped cars. An MTA bus collision in the borough added to the chaos. Across the Northeast, nearly 400,000 customers lost electricity by Monday morning, with New Jersey accounting for more than 100,000 of those outages.
The Numbers Are Staggering
As of early Monday, the snowfall totals were already eye-opening. Center Moriches on Long Island had logged 19.8 inches. Freehold, New Jersey, the state’s highest-reporting station, hit 22.2 inches. Central Park in Manhattan was tracking well above the 9.4 inches that fell during the previous blizzard-warning storm in 2017. Across five states — New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Connecticut — snowfall had exceeded a foot.
Forecasters at AccuWeather had initially estimated 13–18 inches for New York City. Those projections were revised upward as the storm’s intensification outpaced earlier models. Parts of Long Island are now forecast to receive 18–24 inches before the snow ends, with an extreme local maximum potentially reaching 36 inches in some coastal areas. Meteorologists at multiple outlets are warning that several cities along the I-95 corridor could record a top-five all-time snowstorm before the event concludes.
Governors Respond — States of Emergency Expand
New York Governor Kathy Hochul declared a state of emergency for more than 20 counties, including all five New York City boroughs. “We received word that it’s even worse than we expected,” Hochul said in a public statement, “and it is a rapidly deteriorating situation. This storm is one to take seriously.”
New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill issued a statewide emergency declaration covering all 21 counties, effective Sunday afternoon, and imposed commercial vehicle travel restrictions across the state’s major interstates and the New Jersey Turnpike. As the storm’s footprint expanded, emergency declarations were extended to Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Maryland — placing more than 40 million people under active Blizzard Warnings.
New York City Emergency Management issued a Hazardous Travel Advisory urging residents to avoid all unnecessary movement. The National Weather Service echoed the message with unusual directness: stock three days of food, water, and medications, and stay indoors.
The Bigger Picture: A Winter That Won’t Let Up
For New Yorkers, this storm arrives not in isolation but as the latest blow in an already punishing 2025–2026 winter season. The city had barely recovered from an earlier round of historic snow when this nor’easter began forming offshore. Streets that had thawed were refreezing. Sidewalks that had been cleared were buried again.
For meteorologists, however, the storm represents something rarer and scientifically significant: a textbook bomb cyclone making landfall on one of the densest urban coastlines in the world. Some observers even reported thundersnow — the eerie phenomenon of thunder and lightning occurring within a snowstorm, caused by extreme atmospheric instability within the storm’s most intense snow bands.
Relief is expected. Forecasters project the storm system will pull offshore by Monday afternoon, with clearing skies anticipated Tuesday, February 24. But before the sun returns, New York City and its neighbors face one more night of reckoning with one of the most powerful winter storms the region has seen in nearly a decade.
For the latest updates, monitor the National Weather Service, your local emergency management agency, and MTA service alerts before attempting any travel.