An Alberta clipper is cutting its way through the northern United States and bringing a lot of snow to the Mohawk Valley.

A punishing storm has much of the U.S. bracing for severe winter weather. So what is an Alberta Clipper? And what should those in its path be expecting?

There are a few creative names meteorologists use to denote snow storms that originate in central Canada. FOX Weather Meteorologist Haley Meier shows some of those names and their origin.

The term was coined in the 1960s by Rheinhart Harms, a meteorologist at the U.S. National Weather Service Office in Milwaukee, Wisconsin who noted the rapid speed of these snow-producing storms as they moved from Alberta towards the Great Lakes.