Deja Vu All Over Again: Another Cyclone in Arabian Sea Threatens Yemen

Cyclone Chapala last week, left, and Cyclone Megh, now, right
seem like identical twins in the Arabian Sea.  

Last week, we talked about rare Cyclone Chapala, which became the first tropical storm of hurricane strength to strike the coast of Yemen.

As expected, Chapala caused a huge disaster, mostly through flooding. Yemen is normally arid, and Chapala dropped the same amount of rain in a couple days as normally falls there over several years.

Another cyclone in Arabian Sea, named Megh has developed, believe it or not, And it's threatening Yemen, This is EXTREMELY weird.

You do get the occasional cyclone (hurricanes as we call them in the good ole US of A) in the Arabian Sea, but not often. And they tend not to threaten to make landfall with any degree of huge strength.

But this year is different. This new cyclone, named Megh, if it indeed makes it to Yemen, might not be a full strength hurricane, but it will cause havoc by bringing lots more rain to a desert region already strangely saturated by the previous Cyclone Chapala.

About 50,000 people were displaced by Chapala in Yemen, and another 18,000 on the offshore island of Socotra, says Al Jazeera. 

Socotra was being battered again Sunday by this new Cyclone Megh as it travels towards Yemen, so things will only get worse.

Chapala and Megh were encouraged to develop by record high water temperatures in the Arabian Sea. Tropical cyclones are more likely to thrive the warmer the water gets.

A number of other factors are probably also contributing to the twin Arabian Sea cyclones, including global weather pattern called the Madden Julian Oscillation, which is an area of moisture and instability that often slowly circles the equatorial globe. When the MJO is in certain locations, it can encourage tropical storm development.

My guess is global warming contributed, but is not the only reason for the high Arabian Sea temperatures that contributed to the double cyclone disaster. Plus, there was just some bad luck involving weather conditions that favored tropical storm development.

As is the usual case, global warming could well be making what would have been a bad situation in Yemen worse.

Scary South Pacific Storms To Help Spring Temporarily Vanish In Northeast U.S.

Satelllite view captures the swirl of four
cyclones near, north and east of Australia.  

The oceans near, north and east of Australia exploded with four simultaneous tropical cyclones this week, and at least two of them have spread death and destruction.

Hurricanes are called cyclones in this part of the world and they're fairly common in the region.

But you almost never get so many at once, and you don't get them as strong as the worst one, Cyclone Pam.

According to The Guardian, at least eight people, and possibly dozens, died as the powerful Category 5 strength Pam roared over the small island nation of Vanuatu.

It sounds like a very scary mess.  The Guardian reported that the capital city of Port Vila in Vanuatu was totally trashed:

"Save the Children's Tom Skirrow, speaking from Port Vila said: 'The scene here this morning is complete devastation, homes are destroyed, trees are down, roads are blocked and people are wandering the streets looking for help.'

Care International's Charlie Camon said 'Homes have been blown to pieces, and even evacuation shelters, where people had sought refuge, have been flooded and left exposed to Cyclone Pam.'"

The islands Pam struck are home to nearly 100,000 people. Peak winds with the storm were 155 mph, one of the strongest on record in the region.  

Damage from Cyclone Pam in Port Vila, Vanuatu  

Meanwhile, in northwestern Australia, Cyclone Olywyn slammed ashore, damaging quite a few houses, cutting power, setting of floods and storm surges and trashing agriculture in the region, said the Australian Broadcasting Corp. 

The other two cyclones in the region have not hit any major land areas.

CYCLONES AND U.S. COLD WAVE RELATED

All these storms were able to pop up due to something called the Madden-Julian Oscillation, or MJO.

According to the Weather Channel, the MJO is a wave of energy that moves eastward around the equator every 30 to 60 days or so.

When the MJO goes overhead, it tends to create upward motion in the atmosphere, which can form clouds and thunderstorms, some of which have the potential to create tropical cyclones.

This MJO was particularly strong and was able to contribute to these four cyclones.

If you live in the United States, you should care about the MJO for reasons beyone wanting to help the people in Vanuatu.

That's because this MJO is going to put a temporary stop to spring in the eastern United States.  At first, when the strong MJO was developing, it nudged the jet stream to finally end the persistent frigid weather than had plagued the Northeast for weeks.

Now, with the MJO heading east, for complicated reasons it will help throw the jet stream back into basically the same arrangement it had in February.

The MJO is, of course, is only one of many complicated atmospheric cycles and systems that affect the weather way up here in New England.

Still, the MJO's shenanigans, combined with the way weather circulations are oriented now,  mean spring weather is vanishing from the Northeast.

The opening salvo is a bit of freezing rain this morning in southern New England, and some pretty heavy snows in parts of northern New England and southern Quebec tonight and tomorrow.

Accumulations will probably amount to a slushy coating in central New England, one to three inches in much of central Vermont and central New Hampshire tonight as rain changes to snow, up to five inches in northeastern Vermont, and anywhere from five inches to as much as a foot in southern Quebec, including Montreal, northern New Hampshire and much of Maine.

Winter storm warnings are flying tonight and tomorrow for northern New Hampshire and most of Maine.

After that, we get repeated cold waves in the eastern United States through the end of the month. There might be some little thaws between cold blasts, and given that it's getting into late March, this won't be as bad as February, as I've noted previously.

Still, it sure as hell won't feel like spring for the next couple of weeks.

Beyond New England, Lots Of Other Worldwide Weather Weirdness This Month

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  

New England's winter weather has been a nightmare for many people, to say the least, but  things haven't been all that peachy in other areas of the world over the past month, either.

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.

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.