When Winter Storm Jonas barreled up the East Coast of the United States in January 2016, forecasters were already bracing for a major blizzard. What made this storm's timing particularly notable was something entirely beyond human control: the full moon.
The Timing
The moon reached its full phase on January 23, 2016 at 8:46 p.m. ET, right as Jonas was beginning to unleash heavy snow and brutal winds across the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. While full moons don't cause blizzards, they do influence tides, and that influence was set to intersect with the storm's coastal impacts in an unfortunate way.
Why Full Moons Affect Tides
A full moon occurs when the Earth, sun, and moon align in a straight line, with Earth in the middle. In this configuration, the gravitational pull of both the sun and the moon work together on Earth's oceans. The result is what are called astronomically high tides or spring tides, which are noticeably higher than normal high tides.
During Jonas, these tidal conditions were expected to produce high tides up to 5.5 feet (1.7 meters) higher than normal at some points along the coast, according to meteorologists at the National Weather Service office in New York.
Storm Plus Tides: A Compound Threat
Blizzards are typically thought of as an inland threat, but when strong coastal storms combine with elevated tides, the risk of coastal flooding rises sharply. Jonas arrived with sustained winds of 40 to 50 mph and gusts reaching up to 80 km/h along the coast. Combined with the astronomically high tides, the conditions created a significant risk of storm surge and coastal flooding on top of the feet of snow already expected inland.
This compounding of weather events is not unprecedented but is always a concern for emergency managers and coastal residents. Big weather systems don't happen in isolation. They interact with natural rhythms already in motion, and sometimes those rhythms amplify the damage.
In the end, Jonas caused significant coastal flooding along parts of New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland, in addition to record snowfall totals in several cities. The full moon tides were just one more variable stacked against an already dangerous situation.
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