BLIZZARD. A severe, blinding storm of fine dry snow, with a freezing wind. This word is popularly said to have originated in the United States, and is in fact on record there as early as 1830 or 1840; but snore recent investigations have shown that it is used in analogous senses in the local dialect of Lancashire, England. where it can be traced back for several centuries and is usually spelled bleasard. It eame to be widely employed in 1880-81 in connection with the severe storms in the Western States, and has beei• in almost universal use sinee tne great storm of March, 1888, when snow fell to tae depth 01 three feet over the Atlantic States and New England, and was drifted by gales of wind for several days into drifts of five, ten, and twenty feet deep, causing a general suspension of traffic. A simi lar storm occurred in eastern Virginia and Mary land in February. 1898, and one is also recorded for the neighborhood of Norfolk, Va.. in the early part of the last century. The most destructive blizzards, because of the intense cold, occur in the region between Dakota and Missouri and Ohio.
Similar storms of snow and wind are also fre quent in Great Britain. These storms correspond very nearly to the purqa of Siberia and the lotran of They are due essentially to the rapid southward flow of a mass of cold air pushing out ward from a large region of high barometric pressure. They have a well-defined front edge. which advances with gm eat regularity, the rate of progress being by no means so rapid as that of the wind itself, whence we infer that the wind at the front must be rising upward and flowing over. The general rate of progress is therefore due, not to the wind as sueh, but to the differ ences of density and pressure prevailing in the atmosphere on either side of the front. on this account it has become possible for the officials of the United States Weather Bureau to forecast the advance of a blizzard with consider mile accu racy, and very few eases occur in which the citi zens are not abundantly forewarned.