Bloomberg News Really Bombed With It's "Rain Bomb" Headline

This dramatic photo of a microburst in Phoenix earlier
this month probably inspired a wildly misleading'
clickbait article in Bloomberg News 

If you want to be terrorized by Mother Nature, or at least a caricature of her, you would do well to go to Bloomberg.com today. 

The screaming headline on one of their articles is "Forget Tornadoes: Rain Bombs are Coming For Your Town."

The subhead is "Climate Change is Weaponizing the Atmosphere."

EEEEK!!!!

Before you panic and build a steel-plated armor-resistant umbrella to fend off these attacks, relax.

The Bloomberg headlines are just clickbait.

The article is about microbursts, and the piece tried to tie them to the real phenomenon of an increasing trend of more and heavier extreme rain events. That trend is thought to be related to global warming.

But let's not go overboard like Bloomberg did, Jeesh!

Microbursts are gushes of rain and wind that drop dramatically from thunderstorms. The drag of falling rain and hail push air downward toward the Earth's surface. Evaporating water within the thunderstorm also cools the air and makes it more dense, accelerating it toward the ground

This results in a potentially dangerous blast of wind and torrential rain for people who happen to be right where the rapidly sinking air hits the ground.

I think the Bloomberg article was inspired by a viral photo of a microburst in Phoenix earlier this month that everybody and their brother highlighted. ("Everybody" includes me, who was also fascinated by the photo and featured it.)

The excellent photo really looks like a hydrogen bomb exploding, but it really is a great gush or rain and wind slamming downward from an ominous looking thunderstorm over Phoenix.

This is the first time I've heard of a microburst referred to as a "rain bomb". I'm not alone. Capital Weather Gang, for one, was mystified by the term. But I guess "rain bomb" is an effective way of getting people's interest.

But not a good way.

This weird terminology confuses people and falsely alarms people by suggesting climate change is so bad that the atmosphere has declared war on us.

Climate change is without a doubt a bad, scary problem. But, unlike what the headlines suggest, microbursts are not some Great New Menace.  Like 'em or not, microbursts have always been around.

The Bloomberg article also says this about thunderstorms and microbursts in the news lately:

"The past two months have seen some doozies in the U.S. The Empire State Building was struck by lightning twice on Monday during a storm that brought an inch of rain down in what felt like a single sheet."

Actually, the storm that hit New York wasn't all that unsual. The Empire State Building is often struck by lightning, as these bolts are very often attracted to the tallest object around, and we all know the Empire State Building is pretty damn  tall.

An inch of rain in a such a short period of time is somewhat unusual in New York, but it happens from time to time.

The article describes microbursts as "rare" but they're pretty common, actually. Almost any place on Earth that can get thunderstorms can also get microbursts.  If you're almost anywhere in the United States, I'm sure you've been in at least one, or perhaps several in your lifetime.

Once you get into the meat of the Bloomberg article and settles down into something resembling accuracy. Of course, by then, they've lost a lot of readers, who are just going to live in constant fear of those roving "rain bombs" roving around trying to kill them like so many ISIS terrorists.

Still, Bloomberg does accurately note that extreme precipitation events are increasing, even if they aren't necessarily microbursts.

In fact, most of what Bloomberg cites as examples were not microbursts. For instance, there probably was some embedded microbursts in the storms that caused record flash flooding in West Virginia in June that killed 23 people.

But most of the storms were just scarily heavy downpours.

As the Earth's atmosphere gets hotter, it hold more moisture, because the warmer the air, the more water can hang suspended up there.

When a storm comes along, under the right conditions, the system can take advantage of all this extra water in the air to create extreme downpours.

So yeah, climate change might be causing some more weather drama. But rain bombs? Let's just say the Department of Defense is not exactly working on building anti-rain bomb defense shields.

Wowed By Wet Microbursts. Stay With Me Here!

Photographer Peter Thompson captured these
images of a wet microburst in
Queensland, Australia. You can see
how these things look like scary "rain bombs"

It's Easter Sunday, and the nation is being blessed with largely uneventful weather today.

Oh sure, there are trouble spots. There could be some severe thunderstorms in and near Indiana today. Flash flood watches are up for parts of the Gulf Coast, and there's high wind alerts in the Desert Southwest.  

But luckily, there are pretty much no epic storms or extremes to pester us today.

This lack of activity gets my mind wandering a bit, and since we are getting into the spring and summer severe thunderstorm season, I happened to find some stuff on something called "wet microbursts" today.

Wet microbursts are an underreported player in severe thunderstorm destruction, outgunned by photogenic tornadoes, hail and lightning.

These wet microbursts are usually hidden within curtains of rain, but they are responsible for a large share of damage caused by severe thunderstorms.  There are a couple of great videos at the bottom of this post that do manage to capture the drama of wet microbursts.

There's no particular "wet microburst alley" in the United States where they are most common. They can happen practically anywhere, and have raised havoc pretty much everywhere.

Strong updrafts in severe thunderstorm suspend large amounts of raindrops and hailstones up in the the core of the storm.

After awhile, the updraft in the storm weakens, and is no longer capable of holding all that stuff up there. Suddenly, then, all that rain and hail plummets to the ground really fast. 

Where it hits the ground, there's an incredible blast of wind, incredibly torrential rain and often hail. When the gush hits the ground, the wind blows outward from ground zero in very strong gusts. There's always a zone of damage, maybe two miles across, with the ground zero spot understandably having the worst damage.

Winds can easily and far exceed 100 mph in a microburst, so they can be as destructive as tornadoes. That's why you shouldn't relax when there's "only" a severe thunderstorm warning, instead of a tornado warning.  You don't want to be caught outside in a microburst.

Incredible amounts of rain usually accompany wet microbursts, so flash flooding is often a problem with these things, too. Wet microbursts are basically violent rain bombs.

You often don't get as much lead time in a warning about a microburst as you often would with a tornado. Wet microbursts often develop suddenly. Forecasters will often know 12 hours or more in advance that the weather is favorable for microbursts, but are usually not able to tell exactly where they will happen until just before or during the event.

Weather that is conducive to these microbursts is when it is hot and humid near the Earth's surface, where we are, and it's chilly, windy and quite dry in the middle layers of the atmosphere high overhead.

Last August, storm chaser and photographer Brian Snider captured on a really cool video a destructive wet microburst around Tucson, Arizona. Here's some time lapse videos of it and a narrator explains what's going on:




Proving that you don't want to be outdoors in a microburst and that destructive microbursts often happen well outside of tornado alley, here's a security camera view of a July, 2014 wet microburst in the northern New Hampshire town of Littleton:

Microbursts: Beautiful, Deadly Thunderstorm Winds (Storm Video!)

Now that we're getting into thunderstorm season, we not only have to worry about tornadoes in the United States, but something called microbursts.

That ball shaped feature below the dark clouds in
this photo is a microburst rapidy heading toward
the ground. whoever was underneat it probably
got incredible winds of over hurricane force.  

You might have heard of them, those awful windstorms in thunderstorms. The name"microburst" sounds innocuous enough, like maybe a small balloon popping.

But microbursts winds in worst case scenarios can reach 150 mph and cause worse damage than many tornadoes.

"Dry microbursts" common in the western United States, happen when rain falls into warm, dry air. The dry air becomes much more dense as it cools, so it sinks really, really fast to the ground, and you get a microburst.

"Wet microbursts" more common in the east, come when the up and down motion in a bad thunderstorm combines with torrential rain and hail dragging air at high speeds to the surface.

Microbursts are especially dangerous to aircraft, because they an slap planes to the ground or cause turbulence that's so bad they crash.

Pictures and videos of microbursts can be gorgeous, especially with today's easy time lapse technology.

Here's one near Chandler, Arizona in 2013. Note how you can see the spot in the clouds from where the violent downdraft comes:




Here's a neat microburst time lapse in 2011, near the Abilene, Texas airport. Note how violently the burst of falling air seems. That's why these are so dangerous for planes:





Finally, here's what it looks like when you get caught in one on the ground.  This is a 2011 wet microburst in Ocean City, New Jersey. Scary!




Finally, here's a pretty dramatic wet microburst I filmed in Shelburne, Vermont in August, 2011. I was in the right place at the right time. Just a mile either way up the road, there was no wind damage. Proves that microbursts are highly local