The people of Massachusetts were reeling from yet another weekend filled with a major snowstorm that dumped as much as 22 inches* of snow in some parts of the state and 13 inches in Boston, according to the Washington Post. “It’s historic. It’s biblical,” attorney Frank Libby told the Associated Press. “I think we’re in uncharted territory. People just don’t know how to deal with the logistics of it.”
A few, however, were having the time of their lives. And by a few we mean one specific meteorologist, who hit the weather-nerd jackpot when he experienced thundersnow no fewer than six times. It was difficult for Jim Cantore to contain his excitement, and the Weather Channel compiled a hilarious video of him freaking out.
“You can have your 500-million jackpot in Powerball, or whatever the heck it was, but I’ll take this, baby!” an excited Cantore says at one point. And that was only after the fourth instance of thundersnow.
In an op-ed piece for the Boston Herald, Cantore said that warm water off the Atlantic has been “a small player” in these historic snowstorms. “It’s helping to add more inches to the snowfall,” he wrote.
Last year, Slate’s Eric Holthaus explained the basics of the thundersnow phenomenon:
Thundersnow happens only in particularly powerful snowstorms with especially strong updrafts. The sound of thunder in thundersnow is dampened, too, by all the snowflakes—you’ve got to be nearly underneath it to hear it.
Before this past weekend, Cantore had starred in what Holthaus called “by far the most famous encounter with thundersnow” in Chicago on Feb. 1, 2011.
*Correction, Feb. 16, 2015: This post originally misstated the amount of snow that had fallen in some parts of Massachusetts.
