Latest Winter Wall: A bomb cyclone and Florida froze
In the latest round of winter weather, a bomb cyclone could bring blizzard conditions to the Carolinas, while freezing temperatures could reach Florida.
Commuters arrive at Boston’s South Station in the cold on January 28, 2026.
Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
Extreme cold air is once again scorching the central and eastern US and will cause temperatures to drop as far as Florida. Along with this new Arctic invasion, a major “bomb cyclone” storm is strengthening off the coast of the Carolinas, potentially bringing rare blizzard conditions to the region.
“Some areas have not seen this amount of snow accumulation in more than 30 years,” the National Weather Service office in Wilmington, N.C., wrote. on facebook.
The latest Arctic blast on top of already frigid conditions means subzero Fahrenheit temperatures (conditions below -18 degrees Celsius) are expected in the Midwest and Ohio Valley and colder than normal weather is expected across the eastern half of the country. And the cold is falling unusually far south, with Florida facing its coldest minimum temperatures in more than a decade, with even Orlando and Daytona Beach expected to see lows in the 20s F (negative single degrees Celsius). And as Cyclone Bomb develops, strong winds across a wide swath of the East Coast could make it feel even colder, with subzero wind chills expected deep into the south.
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bombs are cyclones Had this name since 1980Meteorologists Fred Sanders and John Giacomo, both at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the time, coined the term “bombogenesis” to describe how these storms rapidly lose pressure – as little as 24 millibars in 24 hours. Scientists have compared the process to the explosion of a bomb, although bomb cyclones are, in a sense, exploding inwards.
Their dramatic name ensures that “bomb cyclones” always get a lot of media coverage, but they are actually not that rare. At least one bomb cyclone hits the continental United States each winter, usually near the Northeast, where they typically collide with cold air coming from the north and warm, moist air coming from the south. “It’s not unusual for bomb cyclones to hit the coast of New York or Boston,” says atmospheric scientist Ryan Torn of the University of New York at Albany, State University. “But it’s right off the southeast coast of the US, which is a very low-latitude place for this to happen.”
The lowest temperatures are expected in the eastern part of the country till Monday, February 2, 2026.
Forecasts so far show the snow is concentrated over eastern parts of the Carolinas and Virginia and far southeastern New England. There is some chance of snowfall on the East Coast between those locations.
But the storm will have more impacts than just snowfall. Meteorologist Jeff Masters, co-founder of weather service Weather Underground, says some areas could also be hit by heavy winds, while places along the coast are preparing for flooding. “There will be a long-lasting impact in these areas that are not accustomed to heavy winters,” he says.
In this case, the freezing cold of the recent ice storm is making the bomb cyclone worse by deepening the gap between competing blasts of cold and warm air: “The air has already warmed… now we’re getting a second push of cold air,” explains atmospheric scientist Esther Mullens of the University of Florida.
And University of Michigan atmospheric scientist Richard Rood says more bomb cyclones can be expected in the future in places like the Carolinas because of global warming, which has increased the temperature of both the atmosphere and the Gulf Stream.
“The oceans are warmer than before and the air is warmer than before,” he says. “This makes the difference between warm air and cold air exceptionally high, and that’s what contributes to this rapid growth.”
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