WEATHER: The High That Flubbed

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Winters on the U.S. East Coast are ordinarily moderated by the Bermuda high, a swirling mass of moist tropical air off the Atlantic Coast that acts as a protective buffer to icy arctic blasts. This winter, because of abnormal patterns in the high altitude winds (TIME, Jan. 20), the Bermuda high has been flubbing its job. Result: successive masses of polar air have flowed down the Mississippi Valley and eastward, spreading out to reach deep into Florida, to bring abnormal cold and, in the clash with tropical air masses, heavy rains and snows.

Last week the South had barely brushed itself off from a freeze and a light snow—which, among other things, broke up a Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans and drove vacationing President Eisenhower indoors at Thomasville, Ga.—when a violent new storm boiled up off the Louisiana coast. Mixing its Gulf moisture with the cold arctic air, it swept north and east, dumping the season's heaviest snowfall from Jackson, Miss, on up into Maine. Temperatures sank to a bitter subfreezing all along the path, sank lower in its wake.

By and large the East Coast could take a vicious swipe of winter in its stride, reminding itself that this was the way the winters used to be in the good old days. But in the South, where the good old days used to be warm and balmy, the winter of the big freeze would be long remembered in terms of heartbreak and heavy losses.