Winter Storm and Winter Weather in New Jersey, January 2 to 3, 1999

Wintry precipitation affected New Jersey the late evening of the 2nd and morning of the 3rd. It lasted the longest in Sussex County, where ice accretions approached one inch in the far northwest tip of the county. A very cold and dry air mass built into New Jersey on the 1st and the 2nd. As the high pressure system built into New England and the adjacent coastal waters, the circulation around it and a low pressure system over the Lower Ohio Valley started to bring in warmer air from the Atlantic Ocean. During the evening of the 2nd the air near the ground was cold enough for precipitation to start as light freezing rain and sleet in central and southern New Jersey. In northwest New Jersey precipitation started as snow and sleet. Precipitation intensity was light for the first several hours of this event. This permitted temperatures to rise above freezing before the onset of heavy rain. The only places this did not occur were in the valleys of Sussex County. It took four hours (from 7 a.m. EST to 11 a.m. on the 3rd) for temperatures to rise above the freezing mark from southeastern to northwestern Sussex County. Water equivalents of ice and sleet in central and southern New Jersey were only a few hundredths of an inch. This increased to one to two tenths of an inch in northern Hunterdon and Somerset Counties and in Morris and Warren counties. Water equivalents reached close to one inch around High Point in northwestern Sussex County. Because this occurred late on a weekend night, the number of reported vehicular accidents was not very high . But at the onset of the freezing rain in Ocean County, between 11 p.m. EST and Midnight, several nasty accidents occurred. A 13-year-old boy was critically injured during one accident near Mile Marker 82 on the Garden State Parkway. Eight other accidents occurred on the same stretch of the Parkway. In Dover Township (Ocean County) a tour bus skidded on a patch of ice and slid 600 feet into a light pole. In Somerset County, four persons were injured when the vehicle they were in struck the Exit 41 sign on Interstate 78 in Watchung Borough. Minor accidents were also reported throughout Monmouth County.