Doyle Rice

USA TODAY

Just two weeks after the polar vortex, another word long-fancied by weather fans -- bombogenesis -- has bubbled through the twitterverse Tuesday, thanks to the snowstorm lashing the East Coast.

The word is a combination of cyclogenesis, which describes the formation of a cyclone or storm, and bomb, which is, well, pretty self-explanatory.

Basically, it means a storm that rapidly intensifies as its center moves out over the ocean, such as what the East Coast snowstorm might do.

A bombogenesis typically occurs between a cold continental air mass and warm ocean waters, according to meteorologist Jeff Haby.

In the 1940s, some meteorologists began informally calling some big coastal storms "bombs" because they develop "with a ferocity we rarely, if ever, see over land," said Fred Sanders, a retired MIT professor, who brought the term into common usage by describing such storms in a 1980 article in the journal Monthly Weather Review.

Bombogenesis is said to occur when a storm's central barometric pressure drops at least 24 millibars in 24 hours. (A millibar is a way of measuring pressure.) The lower the pressure, the more powerful the storm.

Many nor'easters -- infamous big storms that wallop the East Coast -- are the product of bombs, Haby says. The contrast in temperature between polar air spilling over the eastern U.S. and the warm Gulf Stream waters sets the stage for cyclogenesis on the boundary between these air masses.