For decades, meteorologists have rated weather phenomena such as tornadoes and hurricanes on a scale of 1 to 5, but they’ve never really had a good rating system for snowstorms.
A new scale, unveiled on Jan. 30 at the annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society in Atlanta, enables scientists to rank each snowstorm affecting the northeastern United States according to amount of its snowfall, the size of the region it covers, and the population of the affected area.