Weather

Inside Climate News- New Jersey is among the states hit hardest by the blizzard that battered the Northeast Sunday and Monday, with two feet of snow or more and extremely high winds, causing flooding in coastal Atlantic City and other towns. 

But as Rutgers climate scientist Anthony Broccoli explains, storms like this are not only inland snow events. In New Jersey, nor’easters can also push water onshore and trigger coastal flooding, a risk often associated more with hurricanes than winter storms.

New Jersey has more miles of highway per square mile than any other state, which means a storm in the state can leave an unusually large road network to plow and salt. The Garden State also has about 1,792 miles of shoreline, with major population concentrations along the coast, so winter storms can be both a transportation emergency inland and a coastal flooding threat at the same time.