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| Bad weather around the world this month, not just in New England. Here, destruction from Cyclone Marcia in Yeppoon, Australia. Photo from Australia News Bureau |
Here's a roundup of how things are going bad with conditions elsewhere in the world over the past few weeks that you might have missed for all this snow news in the United States.
AUSTRALIA CYCLONES
Earlier this month, two cyclones, named Lam and Marcia, hit Australia on the same day. (Hurricanes are called cyclones in Australia.)
Damaging cyclones hit Australia from time to time, but this is the first time two have hit the nation on the same day, National Geographic quoted the Australian Bureau of Meteorology as saying.
Lam hit near Darwin, but the area it went through was somewhat lightly populated so it wasn't excessively destructive.
Marcia hit near the cities of Yeppoon and Rockhampton and damaged at least 1,500 homes. No deaths were immediatley reported. But Marcia, Marcia, Marcia! It hit an area more to the south than most strong cyclones strike.
CANADA STORMS
I've been mentioning southeastern Canada fairly frequently in the past few weeks because those storms that have been battering eastern New England move on to the Maritime Provinces in our neighbor to the north.
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| A road in Kesington, Prince Edward Island, Canada after the blizzards earlier this month Photo from Susan Gorham. |
The storms have buried parts of southeastern Canada in spectacular amounts of snow.
Since a lot of these storms have been heading due north from New England and Canada juts out to the east, sometimes, the extreme eastern parts of Canada have gotten into the warm sides of some of these big tempests.
Such was the case this weekend in Halifax, Nova Scotia over the weekend. It had snowed a lot in that city in the past few weeks, but yesterday's storm brought a bunch of rain.
Since the city's storm drains were blocked by snowbanks and ice, the city's streets flooded big time, says the CBC.
Oddly, the more north you go, the warmer it gets in eastern Canada. Way up in St. John's, Newfoundland, the mean temperature so far this month is 23.7 degrees Fahrenheit (4.6 Celcius) according to Environment Canada data.
Compare that to Burlington, Vermont, much further south, where the mean temperature for February through Wednesday was 7.7 degrees Fahrenheit.
AFGHAN AVALANCHES
After a fairly mild winter, huge snowstorms swept through northern Afghanistan in the past week, triggering avalanches that have probably killed more than 200 people, says Al Jazeera.
Avalanches are common in Afghanistan, but this was one of the worst in terms of death tolls. Rescuers have had trouble reaching remote villages affected by the disaster because of deep snow and continued bad weather.
MIDDLE EAST DUST, FLOODING AND SNOW
In the Middle East, huge sandstorms struck early in the month reducing visibilities to pretty dangerously low levels.
Sandstorms happen from time to time in the Middle East, of course, but this was the worst one in decades, by some accounts.
Here's a really dramatic video of a sand storm approaching Aswan, Egypt during this storminess:
The dust was so thick that Israel's Environmetal Protection Ministry said air pollution levels there were the worst in five years. People were told to stay indoors until the dust settled.
The high winds that brought all that dust also stirred up the Mediterranean Sea, says Huffington Post. So while people were choking on the dust in places like Lebanon, high surf was causing flooding and structural damage.
More recently, in the past couple of days, the problem became flooding. Serious flooding has hit parts of Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and the West Bank, closing major highways and causing damage throughout the region.
Earlier in the week, heavy snows hit the region, especially in higher elevations.
BRAZIL DROUGHT
In Sao Paulo, Brazil, the drought and water crisis I mentioned a while back is getting worse.
According to the Guardian, Brazil's second biggest city is in its third year of drought, and things are getting dire. There's already water rationing, and water might be cut off to people five days a week, and there's no sign things will get better soon.
Reservoirs are only 5 to 15 percent of capacity.
"Simple calculations indicate that given the current level of consumption versus the predicted raining patterns, there is only enough water on the system to last four to six months. That means the water dould run out before the next rainy season starts in November.
As I noted previously, too much deforestation in the Amazon, and possibly global climate change are ingredients that have gone into the Sao Paulo water emergency.
ALBANIA FLOOD
Also from The Guardian, deforestation contributed to quite an opposite problem in Albania earlier this month. The Balkan coutry was hit by terrible floods.
Says the Guardian:
"Over the last two decades, many Albanian trees close to powerful rivers such as the Vjosa, Osum and Shkumbin have been chopped down by poor villages desperate for wood, and by entrepreneurs clearing the way for buildings and dams in a construction boom that has largely benefitted foreign firms.
The trees had held soil in place for centuries - acting as a sponge during rainfalls - but without them, soil erosion has accelerated flood damage."
The Albania flooding was regarded as among the worst in that country's history.
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