Cristobal Bubbles, PA/NJ Slammed, Norway Slides

Badly damaged house in New Jersey following yesterday's derecho.
Photo by Jessica Beym, NJ Advance

While tropical weather geeks keep their eye on Tropical Storm - now Tropical Depression - Cristobal, there's been plenty of weather ation in the United States and elsewhere.

Dramatic videos are the botoom of this post. One of the shows an incredible landslide in Norway I'll get to in a minute,  

DERECHO AND SUPERCELLS

In Pennsylvania and New Jersey, a derecho swept southeastward from near Lake Erie across the Keystone State and finally off the Jersey shore during the late morning and early afternoon Wednesday.  This was followed in the late afternoon and evening by supercell thunderstorms that prompted a tornado warning in Philadelphia.

Winds gusted to 65 mph or so both during the early afternoon derecho and the evening tornado warned storm.  I don't think Philadelphia had ever previously had two 60+ mph storms on the same day.

A derecho, by the way, is a long lasting, fast moving line of severe thunderstorms that almost always cause severe wind damage. That was the case yesterday. The official definition of a derecho is a line of storms that survives over a distance of at least 240 miles and produces peak winds of at least 58 mph over most of its path.

This derecho produced winds of up to 89 mph in New Jersey, with gusts in the 65 to 80 mph range thorugh a long swath of Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

The derecho killed at least three people, including one at a golf clubhouse that was hit by an immense falling tree.  Many homes were damaged, most by falling trees. A large apartment complex lost its roof.

A derecho usually stablizes the air immediately behind it, so it was remarkable that the atmosphere recovered enough to produce those supercells over Pennsylvania and New Jersey in the evening.  Those storms just added to the damage and the power outages.

Tornado-warned storm over Philadelphia last evening. Photo bu
Ashley Corin 

And - just what they need - more severe thunderstorms are possible today in parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland.

CRISTOBOL

Cristobol has been downgraded for now to a tropical depression as it meanders inland over souther Mexico.  It's still expected to take a northward turn, emerge over warm Gulf of Mexico waters, and strengthen somewhat as it moves north toward Louisiana by early Monday.

Intensity forecasts are really, really uncertain, but at least for now, it's not expected to reach hurricane status before landfall.

LANDSLIDE

The following isn't directly related to weather, but wet weather could have contributed to it.  A huge landslide 2,000 feet wide and 500 feet wide swept at least eight houses out to sea along the northern Norway coast.

Miraculously, nobody was injured, as most of the houses were vacation places and people had left after the weekend.  A dog was rescued in the afternmath of the landslide.  Scroll down a ways for the incredible video.

Here are some videos, first with scenes from the Pennsylvania storms:



Another view of the storm's intensity



Let's go overseas to Chcchnya, which had its own battle with severe weather:



Here's the Norway landslide. I was oddly rooting for the big white house to survive, but I knew that was impossible