Severe Weather Outbreak Hits Vermont: Damage, Oddities, Photos, Analysis

Mobile home shoved off foundation by severe thunderstorm near
Highgate, VT Tuesday. Note the mobile mobile home knocked
over kerosene tank, causing a leak. 

Well, that was an exciting afternoon Tuesday in Vermont, wasn't it?

I have to say the severe weather outbreak that hit the Green Mountain State was the most intense of this summer. It overperformed, in my opinion.

It doesn't take much to push a lackluster setup for severe weather to something relatively impressive, at least by Vermont standards. We're not exactly the Tornado Capital Of The World, as we all know.

Some relatively meager ingredients for severe storms really came together nicely to produce Tuesday's wild weather. It made it a bigger storm day than many of us anticipated.

There was some big time damage in a few spots in Vermont, and one tragedy possibly caused by the storm.  A kayaker drowned and another is missing after they disappeared in Malletts Bay in Colchester. The storms were blowing through the area at the time, but it's unclear whether the storms caused or contributed to the deaths.

Car smushed by fallen tree after the severe storm in St Albans, Vermont.
My house is two miles from this location and not so much as a twig
fell. Very localized damage.

A home in North Hero caught fire, probably because it was struck by lightning. I saw a mobile home pushed off its foundation in Highgate. The mobile home pushed over a kerosene tank and the fuel was leaking.

I also saw trees down throughout the northern part of St. Albans and the surrounding towns of Highgate, Swanton and Sheldon.  There are many other storm reports from the NWS/South Burlington.

Trees are also down on houses in Burlington's New North End. Lots of trees came down on Grand Isle. No wonder: Winds gusted to an incredible 76 mph in North Hero

Yeah, this was impressive.

We knew there would be some severe storms. We knew in advance Tuesday would be hot and humid, one good ingredient to destabilize the atmosphere to produce the risk of severe storms. It turned out the heat got hotter than some of us expected, because the intense sunshine lasted into mid-afternoon.

That led to temperatures in much of Vermont to get above 90 degrees, a couple degrees warmer than expected. That, in turn, made the atmosphere a bit more unstable than it otherwise would have been.

Numerous trees down around a house in Sheldon, Vermont after Tuesday's storm.
Miraculously, neither the house nor cars parked in the driveway were damaged.

We also knew winds were changing in speed and direction with height, which would promote a lot of storms some severe. I guess those conditions led to an even better setup for storms than at least I suspected.

As the event unfolded, instability was highest in a narrow Champlain Valley band from Burlington northward. And that's where the worst storms hit. This system certainly produced!

LUCKY AND UNLUCKY

Big disaters and little hiccups, like we had today, bring winners and losers.

As is always the case, a few places got nailed, while others, nothing. Note that the National Weather Service in South Burlington only had a gust to 36 mph and a trace of rain, while they got nailed across town in the New North End of Burlington.

I was certainly alarmed when I found myself trying to drive through a blinding microburst on Interstate 89 just two miles north of my house. Tree branches flew by in the wind that was trying to shift my truck off the road into the median. It was rather frightening.

My house is surrounded by large trees, some of which could fall on my house and perennial gardens full of fragile plants. I went home to check. Despite the microburst being just two or three miles from my house, no so much as one twig came down. The day lilies danced happily in a light lingering breeze as the violent storm rumbled off toward Sheldon and points beyond.
At one home in Sheldon, several large trees fell on one property. Aside from a few twigs on the roof, the house was undamaged. A half dozen trees were across the driveway. The trees fell around the cars, but not on them, leaving them unharmed.

Meanwhile, a single tree fell into a small parking lot behind Danform Shoes in St. Albans.  The tree crushed a car.  Had the owner parked in any other space at the store, things would have been just fine. Go figure.


ROTATION? PROBABLY NOT

Looks like a funnel cloud as the storm approached St. Albans, Vermont
Tuesday, but the National Weather Service says this was probably
just an eddie and convective debris ahead of the strong downburst.

I want to first emphasize that it appears all the damage from these storms appear to be from straight line winds. The problems I saw after the Franklin County storm all literally pointed that way.

In areas where there were numerous trees and branches down, they all fell in the same direction, indicating straight line winds, and not a tornado.

The same was true for a flattened corn field near Highgate. All the corn stocks had fallen in the same direction.

That said, many strong to severe storms rotate, and most of those rotating storms actually do NOT produce a tornado.

However,  I thought I might have saw some interesting things as the storm moved across Lake Champlain toward St. Albans and Sheldon.  An area of dark clouds on the southern end of the storm appeared to be rotating and I might have caught a funnel cloud.

Or not.

I showed the photo to the National Weather Service in South Burlington. They got back to me very quickly and said, "It would likely be some convective debris caused by eddies and cooling from the downburst winds. Funnel clouds typically do not form ahead of downburst winds."

Proof that not every "funnel cloud" is indeed a funnel cloud.

Still, it was fun to watch Scud clouds rose rapidly into and near this area into the storm, which you sometimes see with a rotating storm. Then again, scud clouds often get caught in storm updrafts, so I'm sure that it was just the typical big storm ingesting more warm, humid air to feed on.

Gorgeous rainbow after the storm in Sheldon, Vermont Tuesday

Too bad I wasn't videoing when I saw this, but oh well. You can't think of everything.

It's more proof that as destructive as these storms are, they are beautiful.

As I was checking out the damage in Sheldon, a second, weaker thunderstorm passed through. It delivered a beautiful parting shot: A brilliant rainbow, with lightning streaking through it.

TODAY

More showers and thunderstorms will be scattered around today, but things won't be nearly as bad as yesterday in Vermont.  (It could get a little interesting today in the Mid-Atlantic states and southern New England.)

Some thunderstorms could produce heavy downpours, frequent lightning and gusty winds especially in the southeastern half of Vermont, but it will be relatively manageable.

Tonight the cold front will have moved through, and Thursday will prove to be a beautiful Vermont summer day, with sunny skies, low humidity and temperatures for all of us staying at or below 80 degrees during the afternoon.

Some Cool Weather Videos From The Past Month

Mud flies into the air in a Swiss village as a debris flow caused by
heavy rain in the mountains crashes through town 

Weather can be photogenic, that's for sure. And those images tend to end up on YouTube.

Below is a collection of some of the best ones I've seen lately. At least ones that don't have anyting to do with Typoon Jebi, Tropical Storm Gordon or the Midwest floods.

These videos are all fascinating, but I think the last one in this collection is the most dramatic.

So here goes:

Mid and late summer are monsoon season in the Desert Southwest, and some of the storms really are doozies. Some videos illustrate this point.

On Lake Powell, the summer monsoon season brought on this incredible microburst. As one person on the video says, "It's like an avalanche."



In mid-August, this microburst was strong enough to remove lots of shingles from this house in Arizona:



I'm not sure where this microburst happened, but boy, when you time lapse these things, it shows their power. Looks like a violent waterfall



Here's a frightening video taken in Glacier National Park during recent wildfires there. A father and son who had been hiking got caught in the wildfire. They tried to drive out as the temperature in their car got hotter and hotter. Then they encountered a flaming, fallen tree across the road. They backed up all the way to where they started.

Spoiler: Somehow, they survived. Firefighters picked them up at the shore of a lake:



In early August, a debris flow hit Chamonson, Switzerland. Severe storms in the mountains set off the mudflow that crashed through the picturesque village. It's really scary, but luckily no injuries were reported.

A Review: Heat And Storms Were Pretty Extreme In Vermont, New England This Week

Microburst winds of up to 100 mph shredded this camp
in West Addison, Vermont during severe storms Thursday
Image from television station WCAX in Burlington.

(Editor's Note:) I'm travelling this week, so blog posts might on occasion be a little spottier, and at times a little less frequent than normal, but keep checking, as I will be making every attempt to post frequently.)

Anyway, back to the weather.

And what a weather week! Record heat, and more important, the heat was broken by some exceptionally powerful, if brief thunderstorms.

 And yet, over eastern sectons of Vermont and New England, the heat returned Friday, even as it became chilly from the Champlain Valley westward.

Here are the details to recap:

We got going on Wednesday, with record warmth across all of Vermont and much of the Northeast, as noted in the previous post Thursday morning.

Then Thursday came. In Burlington, Vermont the temperature reached 93 degrees, tying the all time high temperature for any day in May since records got going in the 1880s.

This makes two of the five first months of the year tying or breaking monthly record highs in Burlington. (The previous February all time maximum of 63 degrees was shattered by a reading of 72 degrees this year.)

By the way, the low temperature in Burlington Thursday was 70 degrees. That set a record for the highest low tempeature for that date. (May 18.)  The old record was 63 degrees.

Elsewhere, record highs were broken by several degrees. Boston reached 95 degrees, beating the old record by five degrees. Hartford, Connecticut got to 96 degrees, beating the old record of 90.

Way up in the northern tip of Maine, Caribou got up to 90 degrees, the first time it's reached that level there since July, 2014.

As I was preparing to leave my St. Albans home for a trip
amid hot Thursday evening weather, I spotted this
strong storm abruptly take shape northeast of town. 

The even bigger story was the brief, but violent thunderstorms that erupted late Thursday afternoon. At that time, a cold front was still well to our west, but what's known as a pre'frontal trough came in.

These pre-frontal troughs are fairly common well ahead of a cold front during hot spells, and, if timed to come through in the afternoon or evening, often create severe thunderstorms. That's because these troughs add lift to the atmosphere already made volatile by heat.

Almost always, pre-frontal trough severe thunderstorms are hit and miss.  Some places get nailed, others stay in the sunshine.

But the people that get nailed really get hammered. In West Addison, a National Weather Storm survey team on Friday looked at the damage from Thursday's storm to see whether it was a tornado or straight line winds.

No tornado, it turns out, but it was as bad as one. A microburst, which is a blast of air from a severe thunderstorm that plunges to the ground that blows violently in a narrow path once it hits the ground, caused the havoc in West Addison.

In West Addison, the microburst landed just offshore in Lake Champlain and zoomed eastward onshore. It cut down a bunch of trees and hit a house, partially lifting off its roof and largely collapsing the structure. The house was destroyed, the National Weather Service said, by micoburst winds of up to 100 mph.

An occupant inside the house was slightly injured.  WCAX-TV reported the situation could have been even worse. The television station said the hosue was actually a camp that had been blown off its foundation and flipped upside down.  Linda Taft, 75,  and her dog were inside at the time.

As the house flipped over the couch she had been sitting on with the dog got tossed around, and she grabbed a pillow to cover her face as she tried to protect the dog.

Neighbors who rushed to help found the woman on the ceiling with the dog, and luckily both were n good spirits.

According to WCAX, one of the neighbors who rescued Taft quoted her as saying as she was being rescued, "I only had two glasses of wine tonight and I never got my third."

Taft was taken to the hospital to be checked out, but she's fine. Just bruised. She said she plans to rebuild the camp.

In Addison and elsewhere, large, wind driven hail blew out windows and dented cars. In Barton, fallen trees blocked the path of a train, and a tractor trailer was blown over. Statewide, 15,000 people or so lost electricity.

Measured wind gusts included 68 mph in Wells, Vermont and 58 mph at the National Weather Service offices in South Burlington.

By mid morning Friday, the cold front had moved into the Champlain Valley, but not yet further east. At mid-morning it was down to 50 degrees in Highgate. Meanwhile, eastern and southern areas got hot again quickly.

St. Johnsbury in eastern Vermont reached 91 degrees Friday for a new record high. On Friday, Boston and Hartford reached 90 degrees for the third day in a row.

In Atlantic Canada, places like Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick, which are coming off an unusually harsh winter, had record highs that got as far as 90 degrees on Friday.

Now, the weather has reversed again, and I really, really hope you didn't think the hot spell made it safe to put your tomatoes and peppers out.

There's areas of frost this morning. Tonight, frost advisories have been posted for the Adirondacks, north-central and northeast Vermont, and parts of New Hampshire and Maine. A section of far northern New Hampshire and western Maine are under more dire freeeze warnings. 

After tonight, the weather is certainly going to remain changeable for the foreseeable future, but not nearly as wild as it has been this week.

Here's a video from Roger Hill of one of the storms rolling into North Montpelier, Vermont

Wild Phoenix Microburst Caught On Film

Microburst in Phoenix earlier this week. Photo credit
Jerry Ferguson/Bruce Haffner/Andrew Park.  

It's monsoon season in the Desert Southwest, that time of year when moisture from either the Gulf of Mexico or the Pacific Ocean off of Mexico is able to sneak into that normally dry part of the nation.

The result is thunderstorms, which erupt during the afternoons and evenings in the desert heat.

These storms can be whoppers, setting off blinding haboobs, which are waves of dense blowing dust, or microburst, which send great gushes of wind and rain to the ground.

There was a doozy of one in Phoenix the other day. (Video of it at the bottom of this post. The first of is what it looked like from outside it, the next, what it looked like right inside it.)

Photos of it look like the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb, but rather than the force of the explosion rocketing upward, it was a great gush of rain and wind slamming to the ground.

As the Washington Post Capital Weather Gang notes, microbursts are created by the drag that's caused by falling rain and hail, along with evaporation.

When water evaporates, it cools the air, which makes it more dense and accelerates its travel toward the ground within a thunderstorm.

Microbursts can be as dangerous as tornadoes.  When they hit the ground, the wind spreads out from the point of impact. Near that point of impact, microbursts have been known to create wind gusts as high as 150 mph.

There were microbursts in New England and southern Quebec Monday that brought winds estimated up to 80 mph. One of these blew roofs off houses in southern Quebec. 

Microbursts are particularly dangerous for planes, and pilots steer clear. You can imagine what a big gush of air blasting downward could do with a plane. There have been incidents of nasty crashes because of these. Most of the time, airports and pilots see microbursts coming and either avoid them or don't try to land or take off near them.

The first video below was taken near or at the Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport. Note if you can the fact that some planes continue to taxi, but none take off once the microburst gets  close to the tarmacs.

"Wet Microburst" Sounds Wimpy, But This Video Will Change Your Mind.

Arizona storm chaser and photographer Bryan Snider captured what is known as a wet microburst earlier this summer smashing to the ground around Phoenix, Arizona.

It's really cool. Watch it below.

No, a wet microburst is not a small water balloon bursting. Microbursts are when a great gush of wind rapidly descends from a thunderstorm, hits the ground and spread out.

Via the Las Vegas Review Journal, an airplane passenger
captured a wet micrburst hitting Las Vegas
this past July.  

Wet microbursts are accompanied by great gushes of torrential rain. (Dry microbursts, on the other hand, have little rain with them, but a lot of wind)

Microbursts cover a small area, usually less than 2.5 miles in scale, says NOAA.  But microbursts in some cases are as dangerous as tornadoes.

Winds often exceed 70 mph in a microburst, and there have been cases where wind speeds in a microburst have gotten to near 150 mph.

Wet microbursts are caused by dry air getting entrained into a thunderstorm, which causes air to start sinking fast in part of a thunderstorm, combined with the weight of all those raindrops suddenly getting caught in that downdraft.

The combination of the sinking air and the weight of the water causes the burst of air to slam into the ground, hence your microburst.

These microbursts can look pretty scary, especially when you see them in a time lapse, like the one from Snider:

Watch:

Summer Thunderstorms Do Crazy Things

Storm clouds gather over Calgary, Canada
as a happy couple embrace last week.
Photo by Cassie Molyneux.  

Once again today, thunderstorms will produce flash flooding, vivid lightning and other troubles in parts of the nation today.

It's the middle of summer, so thunderstorms are de rigeur for this time of year.

Vast areas in the middle of the country are still under flood watches because of these storms.

Besides the flash floods, thunderstorms can do amazing, surprising things. Or be incredibly photogenic.

In Calgary, Alberta, Canada recently, a big thunderstorm unleashed a horrible pelting of hail, a lot of wind and a lot of rain.

According to Buzzfeed, that storm helped create a wedding photo for the ages, especially if the couple in question are weather geeks.

The happy couple, Helen Knight and Owen Chan, posed for a photo at a park overlooking Calgary as the storm approached. Photographer Cassie Molyneux caught the dramatic scene.  The photo leads this post. Click on it to make it bigger and easier to see.

Everybody in the wedding party then got caught outside in the storm and fled to a house to dry out.

Next in our summer thunderstorm tour, we learn that God must hate Wendy's fast food restaurants, judging from this brief but shocking video:



Finally, we have a beautiful time lapse video from Arizona of a thunderstorm producing a microburst.

Microbursts are violent downdrafts of air from a thunderstorm that hit the ground and spread out. They cover a small area, less than 2.5 miles in area, but can be as dangerous as a tornado.

Here you see the giant gush of rain that typically accompanies a microburst as it blasts an area of Arizona this week. Awesome video!




Getting back to the floods, videographer David Rankin captured this flash flood, caused by mountain thunderstorms, sweeping down Johnson Canyon, Utah Monday:

That Weird, Huge Wind Storm That Hit Easthampton,Mass. This Morning Was A Microburst

Aerial view of microburst damage
near Easthampton, Mass. Photo by Patrick Brough.  

Some incredible photos are coming out of the Easthampton/Mount Tom area of western Massachusetts of a huge swath of forest blown down completely by a wind storm.

A lot of people thought it was a tornado, but the National Weather Service officer in Taunton, Mass., went out to the site for a look-see, and determined the storm was a microburst. 

An especially powerful one.

The National Weather Service meteorologists estimated wind speeds in the microburst of 100 mph or so. It covered an area a quarter mile wide and a mile long. That's more or less about the typical size of a damage area from a microburst.

A microburst is a nasty downdraft from a thunderstorm. The air blasts down toward the ground, and when it hits the ground, causes a big wind gust. Microbursts only last five minutes or less, but as anybody in Easthampton, Mass. can tell you, they cause a lot of damage.

That the wind blew at 100 mph and knocked down a whole forest on Mount Tom proves my point, once again, that the term "microburst" might sound wimpy, but microbursts can be just as dangerous as tornadoes.

Trees in a yard, Easthampton, Mass. toppled
by Wednesday morning's microburst.  

I also see a stroke of luck in some of the photos. It looks like the strongest winds with the Mt. Tom/Easthampton microburst hit on a mountain slope at around 4:45 a.m. today,  and the worst of the winds just missed some nearby populated neighborhoods.

No serious injuries were reported, but CBS 3 in Springfield, Mass. is reporting that the storm did manage to damage several homes and cars, two people were trapped in a car when wires fell around them, and a state of emergency has been declared in Easthampton.

A pretty dynamic storm system was passing through New England when the Easthampton microburst occurred. Usually, thunderstorms are their strongest in the late afternoon, not before dawn like in this case. But sometimes, the atmosphere is so primed for bad thunderstorms that they happen at a time of day that isn't so typical.

Storm damage from wind was reported elsewhere in western Massachusetts, and in central and northern New Hampshire. Center Harbor, NH reported a wind gust of 77 mph.

The storm that caused the rough weather in New England is now long gone, so don't expect any more microbursts for awhile.