If you live in the eastern US, from northern Florida all the way to New England, you're in for some nasty weather: a massive winter storm called a "bomb cyclone" is hammering the coast, bringing snow, ice, flooding, and strong winds. That's not a made-up click-bait term; it's actually used by meteorologists to indicate a mid-latitude cyclone that intensifies rapidly — or as meteorologist Jon Martin at the University of Wisconsin-Madison says, they "just kind of explode."

"We would think of them as explosive events, they just instantly appear and get very strong," he says. This particular bomb cyclone could become one of the most intense off the East Coast in decades, according to The Washington Post.

A bomb cyclone happens when atmospheric pressure in the middle of the storm drops at least 24 millibars over 24 hours, quickly increasing in intensity. (The lower the pressure, the stronger the storm.) This particular bomb cyclone sweeping through the East Coast is forecasted to drop by 36 millibars, which is a lot. According to Martin, it means the storm is going to lose the equivalent of about 3.5 percent of the entire mass of the whole atmosphere, from the ground to outer space. "It's exceptionally intense," he says. "That's the most unusual thing about this storm." (Unlike hurricanes or tropical cyclones, winter storms don't get named by the National Weather Service. Sorry, storm. But some news outlets and The Weather Channel are referring to it as Winter Storm Grayson.)