Floods, Snow, Stupidity, More: Recent Wild Weather Videos

Aftermath of severe floods and mudslides in Brazil.
See video in this post. 

As I always say, pretty much everybody has a camera in their pocket, so we get all kinds of new perspectives on everything, including extreme weather.

As I do from time to time, I highlight some of these videos of wild weather going on in the world currently.  

The first one is part of a tragedy.  Massive floods and mudslides have hit parts of Brazil, killing at least 50 people. This video is very much reminiscent of the Ellicott City, Maryland flash flood videos of 2016 and 2018 in which people are trapped in a restaurant as a torrent sweeps cars and pretty much everything else away through the downtown.

This one is in the city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil:


Here's a flash flood hitting Narok, Kenya this past week. Would you cross this bridge in this weather?



St. John's Newfoundland has largely recovered from that massive blizzard earlier this month, but as you can imagine, there's still LOTS of snow on the ground.

Let's take a trip to the St. John's Costco, via this web cam video to pick up supplies. The middle segment of the video is something. Like driving at the bottom of a canyon:



The opposite end of Canada has gotten an oddly huge amount of snow, too.  Not nearly as much as Newfoundland, but for the Vancouver, Canada area, it's incredible. They've had about 14 inches of snow this month, compared to a normal of about four inches.

The snow there typically melts fast and doesn't stick around, but this time, it did. The next clip is from the famous Chilliwack, British Columbia security camera, which seems to catch an incredible number of odd happenings.

This clip is of all the people there who can't drive in the snow. And you thought it was bad here in Vermont! Watch:

Wild Weather Videos To Close Out Your Summer

It's a toasty last day of summer here in Vermont with highs expected to reach the low 80s today, which is a good 15 degrees above normal.

After you enjoy what might be the last 80 degree weather until next spring, we have some weather videos for you on this relatively quiet weather day.

Tornadoes hit Sioux Falls, South Dakota earlier this month. Here is surveillance video from inside a pretty large pizza restaurant that was hit:




The United States gets epic hail storms pretty often, but we haven't cornered the market. Here's one this past week in Guarpuava, Brazil that looks impressive:





Ready for winter? "Snowliage" in Ivanovo, Russia this week:




Finally, a rather unpleasant storm in Baton Rouge, Lousiana this past week. Video by Landon Dinecola via Storyful

Storms Were A Bust; Burning Amazon, Tropical Storm Chantal

Water drops rest on one of my Country Club variety day lilies as
the evening sun somes out Wednesday in St. Albans, Vermont.
Areas south of me got much more rain than my gardens did.

Ahead of yesterday's weather, I asked in this blog thingy if it would be boomer or bust. It could have gone either way.

Well, it was a bust, except in far southern Vermont.  Good news if you don't like wind damage to trees and powerlines and such. Bad news if you wanted a lot of rain.

Most of Vermont did manage some weak thunderstorms and most places got some decent rains.

I missed out up here in St. Albans, Vermont with only 0.2 inches. Though we did squeeze out a brief shower this morning for a bit of additional wetting.

Enjoy it, because for most of us, it's not going to rain again for several days.

The storms did prove to be pretty intense further south, including the far two southern counties of Vermont. Tornado warnings went up west of Saratoga Springs, New York, near Lawrence, Massachusetts and near Hartford, Connecticut, but I'm not aware of any confirmed touchdowns.

Today, the actual cold front will come through, so we'll transition during the day from the humid stickiness of this morning to a dry, comfortable evening.

There will be that hint of autumn in the air, especially Friday and Saturday, with high temperatures just making it into the low 70s for many of us, with most of us getting into the 40s at night.

AMAZON BURNING

Smoke from Amazon fires can be seen from space, as you
can see from this satellite photo via The Weather Channel.

A much, much  more serious situation than strong thunderstorms is unfolding in the Amazon rain forest now.

As NPR reports, more than 74,000 fires erupted in the Amazon this year, with 36,000 or so starting within the past month. Big cities like Sao Paulo, Brazil, are getting pretty smoked out by these fires.

Subsistence farming and ranching is responsible for much of the Amazon deforestation and fires, and it hasn't helped that the relative new far right wing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has railed against enviromental regulations because he thinks it hurts economic development. He has also cut funding and staff to environmental agencies, says NPR.

NPR and other news agencies also say Bolsonaro has baselessly accused NGO's of setting the Amazon fires as revenge against his administration for cutting funding to them. Which is rich. So the NGO's who are trying to save the Amazon are burning it down in a snit.

Bolsonaro sounds a lot like a United States politician whos name rhymes with Frump, but what do I know?

We've been fretting all summer over worrisome wildfires in the Arctic, Siberia and parts of northern Canada, but the Amazon fires could be worse.  The Amazon sucks a lot of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Destroy the forest, and release the CO2 into the atmosphere to boot, and you get more bad climate change news.

Sigh.

TROPICAL STORM CHANTAL

By now, the Atlantic Ocean should be beginning to bubble up with tropical systems, storms and hurricanes. It looked like this year we might have gotten through a rare August without an Atlantic tropical storm.  But then....

Chantal formed the other day at around 40 degrees north latitude, which is awfully far north for a tropical storm to form. It is only one of six tropical storms since at least 1950 to form that far north - basically southeast of Newfoundland, as the Category 6 blog notes. 

This weak tropical storm was able to get going because it was just on the northern edge of the warm Gulf Stream. (Tropical storms and hurricanes need warm water to survive.)

Chantal was always a fairly minimal tropical storm, with top winds in the 40 mph range. It's expected to die out over the central Atlantic any minute now.  However, there are signs that the tropical Atlantic is awakening, so in the coming weeks we're going to have to watch for more tropical storms and hurricanes - ones potentially more threatening than the isolated and lame Chantal.

Dramatic Brazilian Tornado...

A tornado roaring through Xanxere, Brazil earlier this week. 

The United States is now getting into the heart of tornado season now. Between now and the beginning of June, we can expect a lot of tornadoes, if the season is normal.

So far, for the fourth year in a row, the number of tornadoes is running well below normal, which is of course a good thing.

You never know what might come in May or early June, things could really pick up.

Tornadoes are likely to spin up in parts of Texas this evening. Supercells were already boiling up in that neck of the woods as I wrote this in the late afternoon, eastern time.

But this won't be an enormous outbreak. Also, though there will be an almost daily risk of tornadoes for the next week in the southern Plains and maybe the Gulf Coast states, current indications are twisters won't  be a dime a dozen.

Unfortunately, it seems other parts of the world are picking up the United States slack in terms of tornadoes.

Earlier this week, there was a particularly large one in Brazil.

The Associated Press said the tornado hit the southern Brazil city of Xanxere, killing two people, injuring 120 others and forcing about 1,000 other from their homes.

Tornadoes are relatively rare in Brazil, but the area of the country near the border of Argentina and Uruguay is sometimes prone to supercell thunderstorms, the kind that can produce tornadoes.

Somebody on the edge of the Brazi tornado path caught it on video. The video is awfully shaky, which is understandable since the buy filming the tornado could not have been sure if the house he was in would fly away, with him in it.

But you still see the trees and branches outside his window being sucked into the tornado. And once the worst of the storm passes, you see the twisted debris it leaves behind.

Watch:

First East Coast Severe Weather Of Season Departs. Snow In New England?

Lightning over Washington DC Monday. Photo
from Elayne Burke via Twitter.  

The first real out break of severe thunderstorms of the season hit the East Coast Monday, with tornado watches over a wide area from Georgia to Pennsylvania.

So far, there have been no reports of actual tornadoes, but a few rotating supercell storms came close to producing tornadoes, particularly in one storm near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

There were plenty of reports of large hail and some of damaging winds.

The thunderstorms were pretty much departing the East Coast early this morning, but the parent storm system responsible for the hazardous weather is going to hang around for awhile.

A long while, apparently.

It'll pretty much stall over southeastern Quebec, all the while feeding moist, increasingly cool air into New England through at least Sunday.

Nasty looking thunderstorm near Rochester, N.Y.
Monday. Photo from James Montronus, via Twitter.  

That means on and off showers through then, though there will be brief periods of drier air, with glimpses of sun, especially this afternoon.

The air will keep getting cooler over New England through the week as the storm feeds chilly air down from Canada. This means snow.

Before you get scared and think we'll get what Boston got in February, relax. Mountains of northern New York and New England will probably get a few to several inches of snow out of this.

At night, valleys in the North Country could get slushy coatings of snow Thursday and Friday nights,  maybe an inch or two here and there, but that will melt each afternoon as readings get above freezing.

It is late April after all.

The good news about this stuck low pressure in eastern Canada is it will suppress any new storm systems to the south.

Jennifer Blanchard took this photo of snow falling
in Glover, Vermont yesterday morning. More snow
is due in the mountains later this week. 

That means the chances of more severe thunderstorm and tornado outbreaks in the nation are pretty limited for the next week or more.  

It looks like Texas and the Gulf Coast could get some bad storms over the next couple of days, but that's about it.

At least for now.

Elsewhere in the world, there was rough, severe weather, too. A tornado caused damage in a Brazil city.

Severe flooding and damaging winds hit parts of Australia, especially near Sydney, killing at least three people.

Here's a house floating away in Dungog, Australia yesterday:

Cut Down The Amazon Forest And You Make Sao Paulo Run Out Of Water

The Jaguari Reservoir near Sao Paulo looked
pretty full in this satellite image from 2013
From Earth Observatory.  

Sao Paulo, Brazil, South America's largest and richest city, is about to go broke in one respect: Unless they get a bunch of rain soon, they're going to totally run out of water.

Brazil is having a big drought. Some of it is probably due to natural cycles in the weather and climate. Some of it probably has to do with global warming altering weather patterns.

But according to Reuters, another culprit causing the drought is probably the idiots cutting down all the trees in the vast Amazon jungle.

Trees emit oxygen, which is great since we need it to breath. But they also emit water vapor. Lots of it.

The same reservoir is pretty much dried out
in this recent satellite image from
Earth Observatory.  

That's one reason why it often feels damp or humid in a forest. Since there are zillions of trees in the Amazon, or at least there was, a lot of water vapor came from that forest.

"Humidity that comes from the Amazon in the form of vapor clouds - what we call 'flying rivers' - has dropped dramatically, contributing to this devasting situation we are living today,' said Antonio Nobre, a leading climate scientist at INPE, Brazil's National Space Research Institute.

What Nobre is saying is a lot that moisture the Amazon trees were belching out blew toward Sao Paulo.

The humidity often helps form showers, rain and storms that kept the Sao Paulo metro area and it's 20 million people nice and hydrated.

Deforestation is increasing in the Amazon again, jumping 29 percent in the 12 months ending in July, 2013, the last available year of record. It was the first increase in deforestation since 2008.

They're cutting down so many trees in the Amazon to make room for cattle ranches, industry, dams and development. Regulation isn't always so great in the region,  as you can tell, so greed often trumps conservation and sensible planning.

The drought is really screwing up Brazil. In addition to the looming water crisis in Sao Paulo, exports of key crops from Brazil like coffee, oranges, soybeans and sugarcane are down.

For now, all they can do in Brazil is pray for more rain. And pressure agribusiness and industry to stop cutting down the Amazon trees.

"What's happening now highlights the importance of preserving and replenishing the Amazon if we want to prevent Sao Paulo from becoming a desert," Nobre told Reuters.

I Love Security Cameras In Tornadoes

Screen shot of a video taken from a security
camera in Brazil reportedly taken on September 9.  

Today, we have yet another security camera that endured a tornado, this time in Brazil.

Looking at the video, I'm not 100 percent sure if it was a tornado or a severe thunderstorm. My guess is the first part of the video is indeed a tornado.

The wind that continued on after the swirling motion of the wind might be something called a rear flank downdraft, which is an area of intense winds immediatly following a tornado.

The rear flank downdraft can be so strong that it can easily cause additional damage beyond what the tornado caused.

Rear flank downdrafts can also disrupt tornadoes, but are still dangerous in supercell thunderstorms, even those that don't produce twisters.

Another note of caution: I'm not able to independently verify the video, but at least at first glance to me, it looks legit.

Here's the video:

ANOTHER Flood Hits Toronto, Canada; World Cup Soccer City Under Water, Too.

A major highway in Toronto last night.  

Yesterday, me and other weather geeks were watching a slow moving cold front slide through the Northeast.  

The front caused areas of torrential rain that prompted flood alerts in parts of central and southern New England, and parts of New York and Pennsylvania.

But I was surprised to learn this morning that Toronto, Ontario, Canada suffered a serious flash flood last night.

Surprised, because the main band of rain with the cold front seemed to have already gone by southern Ontario and the area seemed largely out of the woods in terms of super heavy rain.

But downpours lingering in a patch behind the main cold front dumped three inches of rain within about three hours on Toronto, flooding major highways, messing up the subways and screwing around with other forms of public transportation.  

Several people had to be rescued from suddenly inundated cars.

The flash flood in Toronto was reminiscent of a similar, even worse incident last year, when on July 8, 2013, a massive flood hit the city. The flood cost about $850 million and was billed as most expensive disaster in Ontario history. 

RECIFE FLOOD:

Meanwhile, we're all gearing up to watch the United States-Germany World Cup soccer match from Recife, Brazil today.  

From @CindyBoren on Twitter, the scene in Recife today.  

I suspect a lot of people are swimming to the event, as some major flooding has hit that city. 

There was some question as to whether the game could go on, but as it stood a couple hours before the match was scheduled to start, the event is still on.

The storm in Recife was very localized, with heavy rain falling on the city with nearby surrounding areas staying dry.

HERE IN VERMONT:

In Vermont, where this blog is based, there was some minor flooding in the southern parts of the state but nothing extreme.

The most rain I found was a rather impressive 2.92 inches at Union Village Dam, 2.52 inches in Putney and 2.45 inches in North Hartland. A lot of areas in the state received more than an inch or rain.

Igazu Falls Not A Place For Whitewater Rafting With This Flood

A waterfall in Brazil had a record flood recently, resulting in some dramatic video

The flow at Igazu Falls was 1.5 cubic feet per second, compared to 100,000 cubic feet per second for what normally goes over Niagra Falls. 

As you can see, even the best white water rafters would probably have been wise to avoid this spot

Here's the dramatic video: