Thanks to a Rex Block over Alaska, the jet stream will take another deep dive from the North Pole to the eastern United States this weekend. That pattern will be locked in place throughout much of next week, plunging most of the eastern part of the country back into the deep freeze. Temperatures from Sunday to Thursday will be 10 to 25 degrees colder than long-term averages across most of the East, more fitting of mid-January than late March.

But the crown jewel of the wintery encore will be a major late-season nor’easter. Born of a combination of bitterly cold air and a core of rapidly intensifying low pressure, a big storm is increasingly likely to buzz the East Coast early next week.

The National Weather Service did not mince words in their headline of a technical discussion of the potential beast: “Nor'easter bomb indicated off the mid-Atlantic coast late Tuesday night.”

The scary-sounding descriptor “bomb”—also known as “explosive cyclogenesis”–is a technical word meteorologists use when low pressure centers deepen at a rate faster than 24 millibars in 24 hours, which happens in only the most intense storms.