Looking back at Philly’s two biggest March snowstorms: 1993 and 1958

March 13, 1993, certainly was one of the most-disruptive days in Philadelphia’s weather history, and throughout the entire Eastern seaboard.

The details of that day are well documented – a foot of snow, hours of stinging sleet, winds gusting past 65 mph, Flower Show canceled.

One of the most significant moments occurred as the snow was winding down. Shortly before midnight, the temperature suddenly dropped 7 degrees, from 35 to 28.

That transformed the entire region into what former National Weather Service meteorologist Art Krause called an "Arctic landscape."

The dense snow and ice cover, with a water equivalent of 3 feet of snow, was locked in for days.

We would call it the most disruptive late-season storm on record – were it not for the "Equinox Storm" of 1958.

A nor'easter pummeled the region with heavy wet snow starting on March 19, 1958, a Wednesday, and continuing into the 21st.

Heavy snow began on that Wednesday afternoon, but the bulk of it evidently came in the early-morning hours, and that created problems.

The temperature never got below freezing during the storm, but the fact that the heaviest fell during darkness allowed the snow to pile up on streets. And, yes, that could be a big issue on Tuesday.

Was it the most disruptive March storm on record in Philly? We would say it's a contender.

Officially, Philadelphia recorded 11.4 inches in the '58 storm, almost 10 of that on Thursday. Rain mixed in with the snow that day, and it all ended as snow on Friday.

As bad as '93 was, it doesn't make the PECO all-time power-outage list. The Equinox storm, adjusted for population, is in the top 10.

And according to the National Climatic Data Center, Morgantown set a daily record on the 20th with 38 inches of snow. The station also reported 6 inches on the 19th and 21st for a storm total of 50 inches.

To paraphrase Robert Frost, one of the species’ greatest weather writers, if we had to perish twice, we would take 1958 over 1993.