Bringing widespread power outages and travel disruption from crippling ice, the winter storm that swept across the country this weekend left behind another mark: extraordinary snow totals.
Over the weekend, the storm left a corridor of snow from the Southwest to New England with 19 states reaching over 15 inches within 72 hours, according to preliminary estimates from the National Weather Service analyzed by The Washington Post.
A weather station near Bonito Lake, a reservoir located more than 7,000 feet above sea level in New Mexico, recorded the highest accumulated snowfall in the country in the past days with 31 inches falling in 72 hours ending at 7 a.m. Monday.
According to the preliminary data, daily snow records dating back to 1990 were potentially broken in over 30 locations, most of them in the Midwestern states of Illinois, Indiana and Ohio.
In another 140 locations, stretching far into the Northeast, the amount that fell ranked in the top 1 percent of all snowy days during the same period.
This vast region where impacts were felt extends beyond the United States and also broke records in Canada. A station at Toronto’s Pearson Airport recorded a daily record of 18 inches of snowfall, and some parts of the city reached 22 inches. This also brought the January snowfall total to 34.7 inches — the snowiest month since records began in 1937.
