Extreme weather is getting more and more attention in the news. We are used to hearing about hurricanes and tornadoes, but atmospheric events can get a lot weirder. There are strange weather phenomena and intriguing names.
Water can grow to 2,000 miles long, 500 miles wide and two miles deep in the sky. These rainstorms are pushed by strong winds from midocean areas towards the western coast of the world. The biggest floods in a century can be produced by the heaviest atmospheric rivers in the US and Canada. California's Central Valley became an inland sea in the 19th century. If the atmospheric river rolls in from Hawaii, it's called a pineapple express.
A bomb cyclone is a fast-growing storm that can bring rain or snow. Bombogenesis occurs when a storm's barometric pressure plummets in a single day, causing the system to blow up. Bombogenesis is the cause of the storms that spin up along the U.S. east coast.
A windstorm that moves quickly in a straight line is usually driven by storms. A storm with gusts of at least 58 miles per hour and straight-line wind damage that extends more than 220 miles is called a derecho. Thousands of homes and millions of acres of corn and soybeans were damaged by the August 2020 derecho.
The smoke and debris from a fire can travel hundreds of feet into the atmosphere. The whirls range in size from a few feet to 500 feet in diameter.
The rapid start of the dry spell was caused by low precipitation, high temperature and strong winds. El Nio can cause evapotranspiration and cause plants to give up too much water.
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Soft snow and hail are present. There is graupel in between. In rare atmospheric circumstances, very cold water droplets plummet onto the ground, hitting the ground with a squishy puddle.
The term "blasting" is used in Arabic to describe a sandstorm. As more haboobs have cut across the Middle East, northern Africa and India, the word caught on. Even though these events often pass in less than an hour, winds can drive dust at up to 60 mph and cause transportation and lung damage.
Ice particles can form when the air temperature is below freezing and the relative humidity is over 100 percent. There are deep mountain valleys where kkops occur. The Shoshone word payinappih is said to be the origin of the term.
A fast- moving, low-pressure weather system forms when moist Pacific Ocean air arrives from the west at the same time as frigidArctic air drops into Canada. The resulting collision causes howling winds that blow towards the U.S. Great Lakes region. An Alberta clipper is a system that starts farther west.
A surge of extremely cold air created by a high-pressure system that develops over Siberia travels across the North Pole and drops into Canada or the US, causing temperatures there to plummet. Sometimes these systems move to the east.
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The wordsnowmageddon may be more hype than meteorology. When a snowstorm hits an area that gets little snow, popular media uses the terms. The January 2016 snowstorm that shut down Washington, D.C., was one of the most famous cases.
Some storms that rage over the ocean can create large waves that crash into the seafloor. This can cause Earth's surface to vibrate in the same way that an earthquake would. Researchers only discovered the phenomenon a few years ago, but they found that thousands of stormquakes had occurred near the U.S. and Canadian coastlines. There were some that were as strong as a 3.5 earthquake.
Powerful winds and tornadoes can be created by strong storms. Straight-line wind is what they're called. The storm draws high- altitude air straight down. When it hits the ground, the fans out in a straight line can be dangerous and cause property damage. A micro burst is a down burst.
thunder and lightning storms are described as a thunder and lightning storm that produces snow. It can seem strange to stand in a storm in the middle of winter.
There is a sudden, violent gust of cold, dense air that dives down from mountaintops. Wreckage can be caused by this downward blast. The Aleutian Islands off Alaska are one of the places where williwaws occur. Williwaw was Gore Vidal's first novel and he wrote it while on a U.S. Army supply ship.
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