Regions of New England

The state is only 190 miles wide and holds three different winters. The Cape and the Islands sit in the ocean and often take the same storm as rain; Boston and the North Shore get the nor'easter at its strongest, with the harbor tide behind it; and the Berkshires are 2,000 feet up and keep the snow the coast has already lost. The blizzards are the ones people count in feet — '78, '78's aftermath, and the February 2015 winter that buried the whole Route 128 belt.

Connecticut is where a New England winter storm decides what it is going to be. The rain–snow line runs across it more often than across any other state here: the shoreline from Greenwich to New London is warmed by the Sound and can stay all rain while Torrington and the Litchfield Hills, forty miles north and a thousand feet up, take a foot. Hurricanes matter too — 1938, Carol, Gloria and Sandy all came up the funnel of Long Island Sound, which raises surge the way few coastlines do.

The summit of Mount Washington held the world record for a surface wind gust for sixty-two years — 231 mph, April 1934 — and still averages hurricane-force winds on more than a hundred days a year. Nothing else in the eastern United States is remotely like it. Below the notches the state is ordinary New England: the Merrimack Valley cities get the nor'easters, the Lakes Region gets the ice, and the North Country simply gets cold, with Pittsburg and Errol regularly the coldest reporting places south of Canada.

The only New England state with no coast, and it forecasts like it. The Green Mountains split the state in two: the Champlain Valley is milder and drier in the lee of the Adirondacks, while the spine holds the snow that makes Stowe, Sugarbush and Killington, and the Connecticut River valley on the east side runs its own colder mornings. Tropical systems still reach here — Irene in August 2011 washed out more than five hundred miles of state road in a single day.

Forty miles across and almost entirely coast: nowhere in Rhode Island is more than about twenty-five miles from salt water, which is why the state so often sits on the rain–snow line while Worcester an hour north is buried. It is also the most hurricane-exposed ground in New England — the bay funnels surge straight at Providence, as it did in 1938 and again with Carol in 1954, and the hurricane barrier at Fox Point exists because of it.