A thread for weather extremes that don’t normally get reported

Coming soon to a weekend near you me: a forecast sudden drop of 10°C in the average daily temp! :eek:



I'm supposed to be travelling over that-a-way on Sunday and there's a snow and ice warning in effect for the roads through the Vosges! Oh, and thunder, lightning and flash floods. Gonna be a fun drive (with no rear windscreen )

Poland, small village near SW end, yesterday.



At least 20 roofs damaged, 8 of them completely gone. Luckily no fatalities, no injuries either.

700-km Brazil 'megaflash' sets lightning record: UN

The UN's weather agency announced Thursday the longest lightning bolt on record—a single flash in Brazil on October 31, 2018 that cut the sky across more than 700 kilometers.

That is equivalent to the distance between Boston and Washington DC in the United States, or between London and Basel, Switzerland, the World Meteorological Organization said in a statement.

WMO's committee of experts on weather and climate extremes also reported a new world record for the duration of a lightning flash, with a single flash that developed continuously over northern Argentina on March 4, 2019 lasting for a full 16.73 seconds.


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RobertKK wrote: »

A Romanian friend who was in the Danube Delta yesterday contacted me to know if I could find out when the rain would stop :pac: I can see why now, this video popped up in my youtube feed and is from a beach on the Romanian Black Sea.

Imagine If you had gone against advise not to travel and were faced with that:D
Keep you isolated at least

East Asian rainy season (plum rains) starts in June and can last all the way into August, it is the result of a weather front that is created when the moist air over the Pacific meets the cooler Asian continental air mass.



9th June Taiwan



7 July China

Maybe not quite on topic but is a bit extreme and weather related!

https://twitter.com/metoffice/status/1284075613331038208?s=20

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/22/magazine/worst-storms-argentina.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB

https://twitter.com/public_juan/status/1296329949578551297

Surprised that the derecho event in the US midwest a couple of weeks ago hasn't gotten a mention:
https://weather.com/news/news/2020-08-11-midwest-derecho-damage-impacts

At a Glance
- Three deaths in Iowa were blamed on the derecho that swept the Midwest.
- An Indiana woman was killed when her mobile home was rolled by high winds.
- The storms caused widespread wind damage as they pushed eastward in the Midwest.
- In Iowa, Illinois and Indiana, more than 1 million homes and businesses lost power.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ5-ijji3cA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBkPichBlt8

Bsal wrote: »

33C in Denver today and the airport is forecasting snow in the morning.

Bolder 33C today and next two days total snow accumulations of 9 to 15 inches :eek:


30-32C in 24 hours difference.
In Ireland probably the greatest difference was 25-26 Dec 2010 which was 25C difference.

Wanderer78 wrote: »

Spotted that alright, that must be really weird to experience

It actually feels surprisingly uneventful! At least here in continental Europe. In the centre of France, we'd regularly get 25-30°C of difference between day and night in January/February. The record, IIRC, is a swing of 55°C. Last week, we had overnight lows of around 12°C for a daytime max of 30-32°C.

It's a shock to the system alright. Where I live, which is near the US-Canada border midway across southern BC, we had 32 degrees C on Sunday, and then the colder air arrived Monday morning, it stalled out around 15 C all day and dropped to near freezing last night. We're going to warm back up into the low 30s by Wednesday, today looks to be around 24 C.

The storm in Colorado has swept the cold, dry air all the way around to Nevada and Utah, now it's moving through northern Arizona. At Las Vegas the front hit at 0700h (today local time) and winds reached NNE 50 mph in gusts. After yesterday's scorching heat, today won't go up much from the morning "low" in the mid 80s F.

The concern is that the strong winds will jump the Sierra Nevada and interact with already massive forest fires in central California and north of LA. It's a bit hard to predict the extent of the strong wind regime in California with the heat trough likely to shift 50-100 miles west. I would imagine most of the central valley will get hit by strong winds ranging from northerlies to easterlies depending on terrain. Around LA they might get alternating Santa Ana and calm periods with the sea breeze front trying to join the party at times. Some very humid air is in place over southern interior California too, dew points into the 23-25 C range being reported. It could lead to some heavy mountain thunderstorms in places.

The strong winds blasting through the Great Basin and eastern WA state yesterday have caused blowing dust problems and accelerated some fires in those states too. Power failures were caused by branches blowing into power lines. We escaped those problems locally as we have no fires in our region this summer. There is a bad situation near Bridgeport, WA (on the Columbia River mid-state) with an evacuation of that small town ordered.

The Colorado snow will probably be a rain-snow mix in some populated areas, certainly trending to all snow around Denver and higher elevations. A secondary low further west near Grand Junction is bringing a chilly rain to eastern Utah and western Colorado lower elevations.

The windy cold front will probably cause havoc later today around Phoenix with blowing dust and perhaps a few storms over higher areas of central Arizona. It won't arrive for a few more hours yet there.

I'm sure there were fire tornadoes before the age of carbon even began. Some people don't seem to realize that huge areas of the North American forest used to burn unchecked every year, and accounts of life a century ago include the routine appearance of choking smoke clouds in the late summer and early autumn.

In fact the term "Indian summer" comes from the observation in New England that warm, dry weather in the autumn was often accompanied by smoke which they attributed to the reputed native American practice of burning grasslands to spook bison herds for hunting. The point is that a lot of burning was a normal part of the annual experience, whether their analysis was correct or the smoke was actually from forest fires.

In the Providence weather journal, in the hot dry summer of 1854, Caswell refers to "very smoky with much reduced visibility" several times.

My guess is that these huge fires in 2020 and recent years are part of a cycle and of course it does not help that there are some cases of arson and human carelessness involved, but on the other hand, in past centuries, similar years would have come to their conclusion only when winter rains set in. The native population had no resources to fight fires and were totally at their mercy, having to move hundreds of miles in some cases to get out of harm's way. Our modern lifestyle keeps us more fixed to locations, and those locations are continuing to spread out into the forest boundaries as suburban and exurban living appeals to more and more people. It's great having a few big trees, wide open spaces, and nearby forest in your back yard until a forest fire comes over the ridge, then you are about where the fire can most easily accelerate forward.

Catastrophic flooding in the Var region of France (extreme south-east) this weekend. The town of Saint-Martin-Vésubie suffered a record 235mm of rain in just a few hours, but other parts of the region had in equally devasting rainfall, resulting in landslides, destruction of the bridges and roads, houses and commercial premises washed away; ten people missing including two firefighters, one person (gendarme) found alive and well this morning.

https://www.facebook.com/SDISAlpesMaritimes/photos/pb.1664118373875190.-2207520000../2847832182170464/?type=3&theater

https://twitter.com/marinebrenier/status/1312052359246340101

https://twitter.com/MeteoCotedAzur/status/1312046277748764673

CelticRambler wrote: »

Catastrophic flooding in the Var region of France (extreme south-east) this weekend.

A "before" and "during" comparison from one of the places affected.


Sadly, there were two elderly people in this house who couldn't be rescued (civil defence were on the scene) before they and the house were washed away.

The river Vésubie rose by 8m in under 24hrs, and the river Var (main river of the département) rose by 5m in the same period. Total rainfall in 24hrs was between 350 and 500mm. :eek:

Wanderer78 wrote: »

Debunk by whom?

Yadvinder Malhi, also Scott Denning

But that’s not the whole story. Trees don’t just exhale oxygen—they also consume it in a process known as cellular respiration, where they convert the sugars they amass during the day into energy, using oxygen to power the process. So during the night when there’s no sun around for photosynthesis, they’re net absorbers of oxygen. Malhi’s research team reckons that trees inhale a little over half the oxygen they produce this way. The rest is probably used up by the countless microbes that live in the Amazon, which inhale oxygen to break down dead organic matter of the forest.

“The net [oxygen] effect of the Amazon, or really any other biome, is around zero,” he explains.

Because of this balance between oxygen production and consumption, modern ecosystems barely budge oxygen levels in the atmosphere. Instead, the oxygen we breathe is the legacy of phytoplankton in the ocean that have over billions of years steadily accumulated oxygen that made the atmosphere breathable, explains Scott Denning, at atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University.

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[...] Typhoon Goni, expected to be the strongest storm to hit the Philippines this year, made landfall on Sunday morning, with weather officials predicting “catastrophic wind damage” as it roared through the country. [...] The typhoon had sustained winds of 135 miles per hour at its center and gusts of 165 miles per hour as of early Sunday, prompting the Joint Typhoon Warning Center to categorize the storm as a super typhoon. [...]

https://twitter.com/dost_pagasa/status/1322645728213176320