Cristobal Bubbles, PA/NJ Slammed, Norway Slides

Badly damaged house in New Jersey following yesterday's derecho.
Photo by Jessica Beym, NJ Advance

While tropical weather geeks keep their eye on Tropical Storm - now Tropical Depression - Cristobal, there's been plenty of weather ation in the United States and elsewhere.

Dramatic videos are the botoom of this post. One of the shows an incredible landslide in Norway I'll get to in a minute,  

DERECHO AND SUPERCELLS

In Pennsylvania and New Jersey, a derecho swept southeastward from near Lake Erie across the Keystone State and finally off the Jersey shore during the late morning and early afternoon Wednesday.  This was followed in the late afternoon and evening by supercell thunderstorms that prompted a tornado warning in Philadelphia.

Winds gusted to 65 mph or so both during the early afternoon derecho and the evening tornado warned storm.  I don't think Philadelphia had ever previously had two 60+ mph storms on the same day.

A derecho, by the way, is a long lasting, fast moving line of severe thunderstorms that almost always cause severe wind damage. That was the case yesterday. The official definition of a derecho is a line of storms that survives over a distance of at least 240 miles and produces peak winds of at least 58 mph over most of its path.

This derecho produced winds of up to 89 mph in New Jersey, with gusts in the 65 to 80 mph range thorugh a long swath of Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

The derecho killed at least three people, including one at a golf clubhouse that was hit by an immense falling tree.  Many homes were damaged, most by falling trees. A large apartment complex lost its roof.

A derecho usually stablizes the air immediately behind it, so it was remarkable that the atmosphere recovered enough to produce those supercells over Pennsylvania and New Jersey in the evening.  Those storms just added to the damage and the power outages.

Tornado-warned storm over Philadelphia last evening. Photo bu
Ashley Corin 

And - just what they need - more severe thunderstorms are possible today in parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland.

CRISTOBOL

Cristobol has been downgraded for now to a tropical depression as it meanders inland over souther Mexico.  It's still expected to take a northward turn, emerge over warm Gulf of Mexico waters, and strengthen somewhat as it moves north toward Louisiana by early Monday.

Intensity forecasts are really, really uncertain, but at least for now, it's not expected to reach hurricane status before landfall.

LANDSLIDE

The following isn't directly related to weather, but wet weather could have contributed to it.  A huge landslide 2,000 feet wide and 500 feet wide swept at least eight houses out to sea along the northern Norway coast.

Miraculously, nobody was injured, as most of the houses were vacation places and people had left after the weekend.  A dog was rescued in the afternmath of the landslide.  Scroll down a ways for the incredible video.

Here are some videos, first with scenes from the Pennsylvania storms:



Another view of the storm's intensity



Let's go overseas to Chcchnya, which had its own battle with severe weather:



Here's the Norway landslide. I was oddly rooting for the big white house to survive, but I knew that was impossible

Winter Update And a Strange Norwegian Guy Embraces Winter, With The Help Of Vodka

As this projected weather map shows, two very strong
storms on Wednesday will disrupt Thanksgiving
travel across much of the United States.

Yesterday's storm in Vermont, as expected, pulled a few surprises.  Central Vermont, as expected, got two to four inches of wet snow, sleet and slush.

However, the light snow and rain that forecasters thought would develop in the Champlain Valley never materialized.

From Burlington north, it was a dark, gloomy Sunday with a heavy, thick overcast, but no precipitation fell. (It gave me a chance to do a little work outdoors, which was nice.)

That storm's gone, but it looks like Thanksgiving week travel is going to be a challenge for much of the United States.

The first storm will travel from the central Rockies, through the middle of the Plains and into the Great Lakes Wednesday.  This will lay down a stripe of heavy snow from Denver to Minneapolis to the northwestern Great Lakes Tuesday through Wednesday. That will cause a lot of problems and flight delays for sure.

Here in Vermont, that storm will give us a slug of of rain Wednesday and Wednesday night, followed by mostly light snow, gusty winds and cold weather on Thanksgiving.

Meanwhile a beast of a storm is due to crash ashore in Oregon Tuesday night with its own package of strong winds, snow and rain on the West Coast.  The storm will reorganize over the southern Rockies and then emerge over the Plains late in the week, so the trip home from wherever your going will be a challenge, too.   It looks like that one will be a big, disruptive coast-to-coast storm.

No rest of the weary.

So, with that in mind, I found this odd little video from a guy in Norway who is a bit enthusiastic about the onset of winter. Certainly more than me.

Clad only in black underwear, he cleans off his car, drives to a frozen bath tub, cuts up the ice with a chain saw and relaxes in that icy tub.  It's apparent that copious amounts of vodka are helping with this. And for some reason he's got a little doll to help him out with this adventure.

In other words, DON'T try this at home.  But the video is oddly entertaining nevertheless. Watch:

Weird Thunderstorms In Norway and Siberia

A large isolated thunderstorm in Siberia recently
looked like a very bad nuclear bomb going off. 

Last week, there must have been quite a lightning bolt in Norway.

Hunters discovered 323 dead reindeer in the Hardangervidda region of Norway, home to thousands of reindeer. 

Apparently, a lightning bolt did them in.

Turns out, this isn't a once in a lifetime event for groups of animals dying in lightning strikes. Writing in Forbes, Marshall Shepherd documented several cases of lightning killing herds of animals.

About 600 sheep in Utah once died in a lightning storm. Just this past May, 21 cows were killed in McCook County, South Dakota when lightning struck as they were feeding out of a metal container. About a decade ago, a giraffe died from a lightning strike at Walt Disney World in Florida.

So yes, lightning is dangerous for us humans. It's also a risk for animals caught out in thunderstorms.

Lightning is something to be afraid of, and people in Siberia recently found something else to fear.

As you can see in the photo in this post, a distant thunderstorm photographed recently near the Siberian city of  Kemerovo really, really looked like a nuclear explosion, and of course such explosions are something to fear.

Local emergency services were inundated with calls from people who were afraid a nuclear war had started and everybody was about to die.

Happily, this was just a thunderstorm.  Nobody died.

Usually, the anvil top of a thunderstorm, that big outstretched flare of clouds you see at the top of the storm, heads mostly in one direction or another, as winds blowing near the top of the storm push the clouds along.

Another view of the scary, but basically harmless
mushroom shaped cloud in Siberia that was NOT a nuclear
explosion, but just a thunderstorm. 

Upper level winds must have been near calm above this thunderstorm, so the anvil top of the storm pushed out equally in all directions.

The storm was also isolated, with no sign of other storms developing around it, which is also unusual.

The atmosphere must have been "capped," meaning a warm layer of air was preventing the updrafts that usually lead to thunderstorms. 

However, something made the air start rising forcefully where that thunderstorm developed, so the rising air broke through the "cap" and continued upward, creating this big thunderstorm.

I'm guessing the thunderstorm was probably severe, or at least borderline so, with strong, gusty winds, maybe hail, torrential downpours and dangerous lightning.

But, on the bright side, it wasn't nuclear. It was just beautiful instead. Phew! 

Arctic Heat And Melting Ice Just Keep Getting Worse And Worse

Click on this chart to make it bigger and easier
to see. The black line is the trend in
Arctic sea ic this year. The red line represents
the record low year of 2012. The gray shading
is pretty much the longterm average 

It seems every time we glimpse up toward the Arctic this year, things just keep getting more and more dire.

The ice is melting faster and earlier than ever before as the increasing warmth of spring grinds on. Temperatures are staying way above normal and are forecast to continue doing so.

Worse, strong, warm high pressure is parked over parts of the high Arctic, which means lots of toasty sunshine to accelerate ice melt.

I know what you're thinking. Who cares about a balmy Arctic spring?

My reply is the same as I've offered before. A warm, melting Arctic can screw up your life. Yes, the life you lead thousands of miles south of the Arctic.

First of all, the less ice there is, the less heat gets reflected back to space. Less ice means the oceans and earth can absorb more heat, worsening global warming.

This is known as positive feedback. Global warming melts ice. The lack of ice makes global warming worse. That melts even more ice. And so on and so on.

The Arctic melt also screws up coastal cities over the long term. The ice melting in the Arctic Ocean isn't that big a deal when thinking of sea level rise. It's like an ice cube melting in a glass. The glass won't overflow when the ice melts.

However, the ice melting off Greenland IS a big deal. That is like a melting ice cube held above the glass of water. Eventually the dripping of water from the melting ice cube into the glass will make that glass overflow.

Water flowing off Greenland from the excessive melts are slowly making the world's oceans "overflow"

On top of that, the jet stream depends largely on a sharp temperature contrast between the equatorial regions and the poles. The jet stream controls the strength, position and movement of most storms and areas of fair weather high pressure - the weather in general.

The Arctic is warming up much more rapidly than places near the Equator. That means there's less of a temperature contrast. Which could mean a weaker or weirder jet stream. Whichwould make weather systems or patterns get "stuck" in place more often.

That, in turn, would lead to longer and more intense heat waves, droughts, floods or even cold waves, depending on where and how the jet stream gets "stuck."

So yeah, worry about a warming Arctic.

Here are some recent details of what's going on up there:

ARCTIC HEAT WAVES

Researchers with NOAA said Barrow, on Alaska's northern tip, had by far its earliest date at which the snow cover melted away in the spring.

The snow was gone at Barrow by May 13, a full 10 days earlier than the previous record.

Meanwhile, the town of Longyearbyen, in the northern tip of Norway - the northernmost civilian community in the world, has had only one cooler than average day so far this year, which is unheard of, notes Bob Henson in a recent Weather Underground post. 

Also, as I noted previously, parts of Greenland in April had its earliest thaw on record. Ominously, there have been more thaws since. We'll see if Greenland has a hot (for them) summer. It would be bad if they did.

(See sea level rise, above)

NO ICE, ICE, BABY

Arctic sea ice is still melting at a record fast pace this spring, as Bob Henson notes in his Weather Underground blog.

The melt is so far going at a far faster pace than the record 2012 melt.

Satellite pictures are showing major cracks and openings in Arctic ice. These cracks, called leads, always happen later during the summer in the Arctic, but never in May.;

Until this year.

"It looks like late June or early July right now," says David Douglas, a research biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey

Scientists are marveling - not in a good way -- about the melting ice.

"We're in record breaking territory no matter how you look at it," Jennifer Francis told the Washington Post recently.

Francis, an Arctic specialist at Rutgers University, studies how changes in the Arctic affect weather patterns in the mid-latitudes were most of us live.

"The ice is really low, the temperatures are really high, the fire seasons have started early," Francis said.

Wildlife such as polar bears and walruses are suffering, too. They need ice to hunt for food, and it's literally disappearing under their feet.

Though things are off to an ominous start, there's no guarantee this year will break a record for least Arctic ice. If it's relatively cloudy in the Arctic during June and July, and if air and ocean circulation patterns assist in pushing ice toward somewhat lower latitudes,  the Arctic sea ice melt might slow down dramatically, as Henson notes. 

WILDFIRES:

Remember that big wildfire in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada at the beginning of this month?

Well, it's still burning, big time, with no signs of containment. Most of the fire has moved away from Fort McMurray, but it now covers an area bigger than Rhode Island and is moving into neighboring provinces.  

The fire probably won't go out until the snow flies in the autumn.

Global warming might have contributed tot he giant
Fort McMurray fire in Canada. The fire, in turn, might
help make global warming a little worse.  

This is bad for a lot of reasons, besides the fact that a bunch of trees just went up in smoke and more are going every day.

We've seen smoke from this fire a couple times this month now all the way down here in Vermont. It makes the sky hazy,

That's soot. It's not great for the lungs. But worse, the wind sometimes blows the soot over and onto the Arctic Ocean and onto the Greenland ice cap.

The soot particles are dark, and when they settle on ice, the dark soot attracts the sun's heat, accelerating melting. If the ice had stayed white, a lot of the sun's heat would have been reflected back into space, so the melting would be slower.

Also, the Fort McMurray fire is burning through boreal forests that have permafrost under the soil's surface.

Normally, the forests and vegetation shade the permafrost, so it stays, well, frosty.  The fires get rid of that protective vegetation and leave charred black stuff in its wake.

That means the sun can get down and melt the permafrost. When that happens, tons of carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas, gets released into the air, worsening global warming.

More positive feedback, like that ice melting in the Arctic Ocean.

So yeah, I hope the few people that live in the Arctic regions are enjoying their warm year. They're probably not. They're worried instead.

We down here in the "South" should be worried, too.

More Proof Of Bizarre Winter: There Were Wildfires In the Arctic In January

This somehow escaped my attention earlier this strange weather winter, what with the intense cold waves and snow in the eastern U.S., the California drought, the epic British storms and floods, the Australian and Brazilian heat and the Alaskan mega-thaw keeping me totally busy.  

One of the big, bizarre Arctic wildfires
rages in Norway in January (!!)  

Apparently, there were wildfires in Arctic regions of Norway. In January. You know, when there should be plenty of snow and ice around to keep anything remotely like that from happening.

But a huge drought, along with a super warm December and a lot of wind touched off the fires, which destroyed a number of homes in Norway.

I wonder what bizarre weather event will happen next. At this rate, the only thing we'll consider bizarre is normal weather. All the extremes will seem like par for the course.

He's a video of the midwinter Arctic fire. Pretty impressive in size:

Norwegian Town Finds Its Way Out Of The Winter Darkness

I don't know about you, but I really am dreading the darkness of winter.

Mirrors on the mountains direct a patch of reflected
sunlight onto the town square in Rjukan, Norway.  

I like daylight, and it's getting to the point where its dark too often. By December, it will seem like it's nightime all the time.  With the darkness comes the cold, too.

 It's a little depressing, frankly, but like (almost) everybody else, I'll get through it.

At least here in Vermont, we see glimpses of sun even in the cloudiest, darkest days of December when the days are shortest.

Up above the Arctic Circle, of course, there's weeks of darkness in the winter. Ugh.

And there's a town in Norway called Rjukan, where the lack of sun is particularly frustrating in the winter. It's in a deep mountain valley, so when the sun is at a low angle in the winter, they can see the light shining on the mountaintops, but the sun never reaches the valley.

So close, and yet so far. The town does have a cable car that residents can use to go up the mountains and see the sun.

Now, the town of Rjukan has an ingenious new idea for some sun. They've positioned mirrors on some of the hillsides, which reflects lights down on Rjukan's pretty town square, according to the Telegraph UK.

The sun is out in downtown Rjukan!

The Telegraph article says computers control the position of the mirrors, so that as the sun moves to different positions in the sky during the day and during the course of the winter, the mirrors adjust to make sure the sun keeps shining in the town square.

I don't know if the mirrors solve all the town's problems with a lack of sunshine, but at least it helps.

I know they tell us to stay out of the sun to avoid skin cancer, and that's great advice, but even fair skinned people need a little sun frequently to manufacture Vitamin D in their bodies. 

As I noted, the lack of sun in winter is a bit depressing, to the point where some people have a real problem with seasonal depression.

So, congratulations to Rjukan for finding at least a partial solution to its sunlight problem.