This 'N That And Storm Videos Too

After a nice day, storm clouds gather late in the afternoon Friday
over Georgia, Vermont. They produced wind gusts to about'
 40 mph and brief downpours. 

Last evening in Vermont proved that even once you get rid of the humidity, storminess can still reign.

It was certainly gorgeous in the Green Mountain State Friday, with that lower humidity and sunshine. But, a serious of little cold fronts continued to slide through, and one was timed perfectly in the late afternoon and early evening to produce some gusty showers and thunderstorms.

Winds aloft were pretty strong for this time of year, so the storms were able to pull some of that wind to the surface. There was nothing severe, but gusts of 40 mph and brief heavy downpours, like what I saw in Georgia and other Vermonters saw, are nothing to sneeze at.

Today will be showery, too, even with the sun mixing in. In the mid and upper atmosphere, some of the coldest air in North America is over or near us. With the air temperature rapidly dropping with height, updrafts are easy to create. These form billowing clouds and showers. There won't be anything extreme. And Sunday is looking nice: Sunny and warmish (70s) with low humidity.

Elsewhere, obviously, the weather is worse.

In places like Washington State and parts of the northern Rockies, they are simultaneously under wildfire alerts and flash flood watches. That sounds a little strange but can happen from time to time.

Thunderstorms are expected to move through that area later today and tonight, and some of them will be strong. Like most outbreaks of thunderstorms, this one will be rather hit and miss. Near the edges of the thunderstorms, lightning will hit dry vegetation and set fires, while erratic winds from the storms spread the blazes.

In the core of the thunderstorms, gushing downpours will develop, causing quickly rising water and debris flows, especially in areas denuded by previous forest fires. Today's not a great day to be hiking in the northern Rockies or Pacific Northwest, that's for sure!

In Europe, it's awfully stormy. The United Kingdom's Met Office is alerting people to the flash flooding and high winds expected today. Yesterday, a tornado him Amsterdam, the Netherlands and an even bigger twister hit Luxembourg, of all places. The Luxembourg tornado injured at least seven people and damaged at least 100 houses.

Here's a video, most of it in slo-mo, of the tornado in Luxembourg:



Meanwhile, near London, the Luton Airport, a smaller cousin to the more famous Heathrow, had its own trouble as torrential downpours broke through the roof. Watch:



In eastern China, a typhoon made landfall on Friday. In this Chinese government video, a landslide caused by the typhoon's heavy rains abruptly blocks an expressway tunnel:



Finally, a tornado/waterspout breezes through a waterfront area of Amsterdam the Netherlands:

Terrifying Chinese Tornado Kills Six: More Scary Videos

Aftermath of this week's deadly tornado in China.

A few days ago, I reported on odd tornadoes in Taiwan and Oregon.

A couple days - on Wednesday after those other twisters, an even bigger tornado struck northeastern China, killing six people, injuring 190 and causing widespread damage.

Like the Taiwanese tornado, there were foolhardy people in the Chinese tornado that kept filming even when the tornado was right on top of them. That is, of course, very dangerous.

Northeastern  China is flat, like the Great Plains of the United States and at about the same latitude. That means tornadoes can and do form there, but they are rarely as bad as this one was. Occasionally, though, northeastern China does get a major tornado, and that was the case here.

As usual, there are some incredible videos of this storm. Here are a few:

This first one is perhaps the most terrifying. It's a view, apparently from inside an apartment of the tornado approaching then striking. If you have the sound up, you can hear toward the end how loud these things are when they're chewing up buildings:



Here's a compilation video of the tornado and its aftermath:

Spring Can Be Fire Season; Huge Wildfire Disasters In South Korea, China

Wildfires burn this past week among buildings in northeastern South
Korea. Photo by Gangwon Lobo, Getty Images.

When I got up at my house in St. Albans, Vermont this morning, it was dank and damp out. There was a slushy coating of melting snow on the ground from last night. There was a bit of fog, and water dripped from the trees.

Not exactly the kind of weather that would be conducive to brush fires. But this is the time of year they can happen.  Mostly in areas where it is early spring, and things haven't really greened up yet.

Here in Vermont, it will generally be too damp over the next several days at least to worry much about brush fires.

Plus, this time of year has a reputation of being too soggy to allow for brush fires. But with last year's vegetation all dried out and things yet to green up, a few dry days would boost the risk. It wouldn't take long for things to dry out, either, if the weather cooperated.

This time of year is the peak season for brush fires in Vermont, believe it or not. We do get extended periods of damp weather in April - April showers bring May flowers after all. However, we also often have weather patterns in which very dry, sunny high pressure areas drift down from Canada and stall in our area. That creates several days in a row in which moisture can quickly evaporate.

The sun is strong, and there's no leaves on the trees to stop that drying sun to penetrate the forest floor. There was a fire risk the other during dry, windy weather, so it can happen.  It's just not in our immediate future.

There was absolutely no fire danger this morning in this brushy area behind
my St. Albans, Vermont house this morning, what with the slushy covering
from an overnight snow and a foggy, drizzly atmosphere. But this same
area can dry out within a couple days this time of year. Obviously, I do
my brush pile burns in the winter, when there's deep snow on the
ground, and not during fire-prone April.

It's happening elsewhere, though, as other areas of the Northern Hemisphere are waiting for the spring green up.

Springtime wildfires turned into a major disaster in South Korea this week, when strong winds and dry weather whipped up wildfires in that country's Gangwon Province. The fires destroyed hundreds of homes and killed at least two people. 

Springtime wild and brush fires do pop up almost yearly in this region of northeastern South Korea, but they normally stay in the mountains and don't get this big. This one was the worst in decades, hopscotching from town to town. This is the region that hosted the Winter Olympics last year, and the fires burned through neighborhoods and between high rise buildings and commercial tracts.

Most of the fires had been largely contained as of Friday.

An even worse wildfire this past week in China killed at least 30 people, most of them firefighters battling the blaze in Sichuan province at elevations as high as 12,000 feet. That elevation, and the extremely steep slopes where the fires were burning had to be challenging to say the least.

Back here in the United States, Vermont pretty much escaped having any wildfires this past week, although one was reported around Hartford, near White River Junction. The only regions of the state that could have had them were the Champlain and lower Connecticut River valleys. Other areas of the state were still snow covered, so no fires there. Yet. Wait until the snow melts.

There were forest and brush fires, though in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Massachusetts. There were no injuries and damage to buildings was very minimal or nonexistent. But the fires prove you can get them around here this time of year.

As noted, there's no particularly dry weather in our immediate future. But if we have a stretch of warm, sunny weather late this month or in the first half of May, be careful. I can't imagine we'd get anything as bad locally as there was in South Korea, but these fires can cause some real damage.

No outdoor burning, please, and don't be an idiot and throw your cigarette butt out the car window.

Here's a video of the Korean fires:

Carbon Emissions To Hit Record High This Year

Global carbon emissions are expected to rise this year
after three years of no growth, disappointing c
climate change activists

Carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels will reach a record high this year, according to news from the UN world climate summit ongoing now in Bonn, Germany.

Emissions had been flat for the past three years, which raised some hopes that the long decades long increase in carbon emissions had finally peaked. The carbon emissions are of course what is behind global warming.

As the Guardian points out, however, you can't read too, too much into one year. The increase this year was driven by an improved world economy. Increased industrial and economic output corresponds to increased carbon emissions.

Also, a piece of the problem was dry weather in China, which reduced hydroelectric power output. So  China resorted to fossil fuels to make up the difference.

Growing economic powers like China are emphasizing more renewable resources, like wind and solar, though coal and oil are still mainstays of China and the rest of the industrialized world.

The Guardian article reflected mixed reactions in the world of climate change watchers.

"The news that emissions are rising after the three-year hiatus is a giant leap backwards for humankind....Pushing the Earth closer to tipping points is deeply concerning. Emissions need to peak soon and approach zero by 2050," said Amy Luers, executive director of the global research initiative Future Earth.

Other officials said there's naturally going to be year to year fluctuations in carbon emissions. It's possible 2017 will turn out to be a blip in an otherwise steady or slowly falling carbon emissions trend. Who knows?

Dramatic Videos Show The Weather Could Always Be Worse Where You Are

A five story building begins to topple into a
river in China during severe floods recently. Video
is below. 

It's a somewhat cloudy Sunday, and us Vermonters are destined to endure a very rainy, quite chilly Monday.  

As Trump would tweet: Sad!

To prove it could always be worse, what follows are some videos that show some pretty dramatic storms elsewhere in the world. T

hey will make you happy that your biggest weather problem is a dreary, wet and cold midsummer start to the workweek.

The bad weather has hit all corners of the world, as you'll see.

For starters, we've had a week of repeated severe storms stretching from South Dakota, through the Great Lakes and on into the Mid-Atlantic states. (There was even a rogue, isolated severe thunderstorm Saturday in southern Addison and Rutland counties in Vermont, but I don't think there was widespread damage.)

Not true elsewhere, though, as this video of a terrible hailstorm Tuesday in South Dakota. The hail, with wind, even managed to split a tree in this view of a back yard during the storm:




New Zealand has been hit this past week by a massive winter storm. (Southern Hemisphere, so it's winter there.)

Some areas received up to 10 inches of rain. One of the hard hit cities was Churchchrist, which has had a rough time in recent years. That city had a destructive, deadly earthquake in 2011.

Here's a video from New Zealand:



Farmers have to work in all kinds of weather, and Clinton Monchuk this past week was spraying fungicide on his malt barley fields near Lanigan, Saskachewan, Canada, and was accompanied on  his chores by a tornado:


In Cornwall, England, severe flash flooding hit this week and several people had to be rescued.

Here's a view that includes massive amounts  of flood water flowing into the sea:



Finally, this includes some of the most dramatic footage: Watch a truck and a building fall into rivers amid severe flooding in China in the past few days:

China Crisis: Imagine Having To Flee Your City Because The Smog Is So Bad

For some reason, these Chinese students were forced
to take exams outdoors in a thick, toxic smog.  

The only thing obscuring the skies over my house in relatively clean Vermont today is pure white snowflakes.

Which makes me doubly glad I don't live in northern and central China, where the smog has gotten so bad people are fleeing the pollution-choked cities.

According to the Guardian newspaper:

"Tens of thousands of 'smog refugees" have reportedly fled China's pollution-stricken morth after the country was hit by the latest 'airpocalyse, forcing almost half a billion people to live under a blanket of toxic fumes.

Hugh swaths of north and central China have been living under a pollution 'red alert' since last Friday when a dangerous cocktail of pollutants transformed the skies into a yellow and charcoal-tinted haze"

These winter time smog attacks in China have been creating health hazards for years now. In the winter, temperature inversions often form, with warm air overlying cold air near the surface.

That warm air forms a lid, trapping pollutants in the cold air instead of letting it escape. Sunshine often breaks up inversions, allowing the pollution to drift away. But the weak winter sun is often incapable of breaking inversions like the stronger spring and summer sun can.

The Guardian said Ctrip, China's leading online travel agent, said it expected 150,000 travelers from China to head to places like Australia, Indonesia, Japan and the Maldives to escape the killer smog.

More from the Guardian:

"Yang Xinglin, who also fled to Chongli (a mountain resort away from the pollution) said she requested time off from her job at a state-owned real estate firm so she did not have to inhale the smog.

'You ask me why I left Beijing? It's because I want to live,' Yang, 27, told the Guardian."

Some who wanted to flee the smog couldn't because the poor visibility associated with the pollution was grounding hundreds of flights.

One particular source of outcry over the pollution came when a school headmaster in Henan province forced eighth grade students to take exams outdoors all day in the thick smog, despite the obvious health risks.

As you can see by the photo in this post, you can barely make out the students in the smog.

Chinese government authorities had ordered schools closed because of the smog, but the principal of the school decided to go ahead with the exams anyway since they'd already been organized, said the Straights Times. 

It's unclear why the school made the students take exams outside in the heavily polluted air instead of indoors, where it might have been a little safer.

The principal of the school has since been suspended.

The air is even worse than usual in China this winter because the government is pumping stimulus into polluting industries to prop up the economy. Greenpeace said poorly regulated steel producers are adding to the smog even more than in past winters.

Greenpeace says there is hope in China that things could get better in future winters because use of coal is expected to decrease and the government is investing in cleaner industry and environmental regulations.

Terrible Chinese Tornado Kills Nearly 100 People

A victim of the massive Chinese tornado this week. 

A vicious tornado struck near the city of Yancheng, and its wide destructive path through heavily populated villages and towns took nearly 100 lives and injured close to 800 people, the BBC said.

Chinese state media said it was the worst tornado to strike the nation in at least half a century.

Meanwhile, that well-advertised outbreak of severe weather in the United States Wednesday and Thursday did indeed happen, but it really could have been worse.

More details on that toward the bottom of this post, but first, China's tornado disaster, which really was as bad as it can get, pretty much.

CHINA

Rescue efforts at the scene of the Chinese tornado were being messed up by heavy rain and the risk of more hailstorms and tornadoes in the area.

Photos and video showed widespread destruction, with man buildings leveled or destroyed, cars tossed around and utilities in ruins.

Based on the photos, I'd guess the tornado was an EF4, the second strongest on the Enhanced Fujita scale, a widely used ranking system that judges the strength of tornadoes.

An EF4 woul have winds of between 166 and 200 mph.

The huge Chinese tornado was obviously just as terrifying as the big ones that sometimes strike the middle and southern parts of the United States in the spring and early summer.

"It was like the end of the world......I heard the gales and ran upstairs to shut the windows. I had hardly reached the top of the stairs when I heard a boom and saw the entire wall with windows on it torn away," local resident Xie Litian told the Chinese state news agency, according to the BBC. 

Yancheng and the surrounding province of Jiangsu is on the central coast of China, well southeast of Beijing.  

More destruction from the tornado in China this week.  

The Chinese tornado proves once again that the United States isn't the only place to get big tornadoes.

This time of year, the Jiangus region in China is especially prone to dangerous storms, notes Bob Henson in a Weather Underground blog post. 

A weather front often sets up and stalls over eastern China as the southwest monsoon begins to push northward in the spring and summer.

Intense thunderstorm complexes very frequently form along this front, causing severe floods, severe thunderstorms, and sometimes, tornadoes.

Storm activity is often worse in a year following an El Nino, which is the case now, Henson notes.

UNITED STATES

As expected, a big complex of severe storms got going in Illinois Wednesday and raced southeastward all the way to North Carolina by Thursday morning.

According to NOAA's Storm Prediction Center, there were 22 reports of tornadoes, almost all of them in Illinois, with a swath of scattered wind damage through Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina.

Luckily, the tornadoes hit in mostly rural areas, so damage and injuries weren't as bad as they could have been had they hit more populated areas. The Chicago Tribune reported four injuries from the tornadoes in Illinois, but thankfully no deaths.

Severe weather is possible across mostly the northern tier of the United States over the next few days, but no blockbuster outbreaks of dangerous weather are expected.

Parts Of China Shrouded In Dangerous Smog, Again

Thick smog in Beijing, China during the day Tuesday.

Over the past couple of days, Beijing, China has been shrouded in smog so thick that the World Health Organization says is 20 times above the level considered healthy.

It's interesting that the smog really peaked as the UN Climate Summit in Paris got really rolling.

The smog is caused by China's reliance on coal burning, and the fact that it has a big steel producing industry. That industry uses a zillion tons of coal to produce that product. The result is these terrible smog outbreaks.

When I bring up climate in terms of China's smog, I don't mean to suggest the smog itself directly contributes to global warming. The smog consists of particulates, which, in high doses as in China, can cause cancer and a host of respiratory illnesses, some fatal.

The smog gets thick when a temperature inversion forms. It's colder in the valleys around Beijing and other major cities than it is in the air a few thousand feet up. The warmer air up above forms a lid, preventing pollutants from blowing away. The pollution just sits and accumulates dangerously in the cities instead.

To combat the immediate problem, China has ordered schools closed, reduction in factory output and less driving untill the weather pattern changes and the smog dissipates some.

Some estimates suggest China's smog outbreaks are shortening life expentancy by five years. Tsignhua and Peking University studies indicate air pollution from coal consumption caused almost 700,000 deaths last year, Fortune reports.

As I mentioned, the smog isn't a direct contributor to global warming. However, the coal burning that is causing the smog DOES contribute to global warming, usually more so than oil or natural gas.

Fortune says China's environmental minister says that despite the smog, the country has achieved targets for reduing major pollutants. The government reported emissions of sulfur dioxide dropped by 13 percent from levels five years ago, and water pollution was down, too.

This isn't the first time smog has risen to extremely dangerous levels in China. There were repeated bouts of smog at this level last winter, and the smog has been increasing in China for decades.

Clearly, though, China has a lot more to do clear the air and save its citizens from potentially early deaths.

Hard To Breathe In This Polluted Chinese City

There's a brisk west breeze in Vermont this Thursday and the air is fresh and clean, as it usually is in this part of the world.

In this photo from Getty Images, a man in Harbin,
China navigates a bike through the thick smog.  

Which means I can try to ignore the chill, and the occasional rain, sleet and snow sprinkles that have been coming down.

It could be worse.

In parts of China, the air pollution has been off the charts lately. Fine particulate pollution in the Chinese city of Harbin was 40 times worse than the level set by the World Health Organization. 

The pollution, with its obvious health hazard and extremely bad visibility in the smog, pretty much closed down the city of almost 11 million people earlier this week.

According to the Telegraph UK:

"You could feel the burning smell in the air, and on the second day the thick fog just blocked your waay, keeping you from seeing anytbing," said Song Ting, a 21-year-old student in Harbin. "It's still disgusting."

Zhao Yao, a 25-year-old IT engineer, said "You feel sick when you breathe. You can't see many people on the street now, and some people wear three masks when going out."

The air pollution happened because a high pressure system parked itself over the region of China most affected by the pollution.

The fatal smog in Donora, Pa. in October, 1948
(Walter Stein, AP)  

Such high pressure systems sometimes do that in the northern hemisphere, often in the autumn and early winter.

The wind is light under these high pressure systems, so pollutants have nowhere to go. And the air sinks beneath these systems, so the smoke and gunk can't just go up, up, up and away.

This weather pattern is called an inversion because the air is warmer high aloft than near the Earth's surface, which is opposite of the usual arrangement of decreasing temperature with height.

That warm air way up above the ground acts as a lid that keeps pollutants down here where people live.

Places with better pollution controls usually fare better than China in these scenarios. Here in Vermont, we sometimes get these stalled high pressure systems this time of year. Pollution from cars and wood stoves increases during these times, but it doesn't usually get dangerous for most people.

China, however, is a differnet story. People are firing up their heaters, fueled  by pollution-laden coal, power plants, also fueled by coal, add to the problem. So do the zillions of cars in the region. And the farmers burning the corn stubble in their recently harvested fields outside the city.

China isn't exactly the most transparent, forthcoming nation in the world, so it's hard to tell how many people got sick or died during this pollution episode. But the situation is dangerous, and I'm sure plenty of people have passed away, mostly people who have pre-existing conditions, such as heart and lung disease.

Historically, there have been episodes like this in the Western Hemisphere, before pollution control laws really came into vogue.

On October 27, 1948, a high pressure system, and its inversion, settled over Pennsylvania, including the valley town of Donora.

Donora, 25 miles south of Pittsburgh, had a zinc plant and a steel mill at the time, and pollutants from the factories hung over Donora.

At least 20 people died, and about 7,000 people got sick. Despite the obvious crisis unfolding in the town at the time, the owners of the zinc plant refused to temporarily shut it down. Hey, profits over people right?

In December, 1952, a similar smog hung over London for almost a week, causing almost 12,000 more deaths than would normally be expected over that time period.

Now China is having these smog attacks. I imagine the government there will be tightening pollution control laws pretty soon.