WEATHER MAP GAME
Hey, so remember the weather map game? I’m sorry but I forgot about it and this was the last one.
So the answer to this game is January 4, 1992, and the storm is technically a nor’easter. But if you look closely, you’ll see that the air around the storm is pretty warm for January and its center was warm as well. It made landfall near Chincoteague, VA. The Delaware Geological Service wrote a report on the system. It’s got a nice eye feature too.
Nor’easters are extratropical. Their centers are cold, and they contain fronts. Tropical cyclones are...well tropical. They have a warm center, and they do not have fronts.
Sometimes these storms are hybrids. Hurricane Sandy was such a storm, which made forecasting and issuing warnings for it extremely difficult. Hurricane Alex, earlier this year, began this way. I believe storm “Mars” was such a storm briefly when the Anthem of the Seas encountered it (I’m still researching this). The unnamed Perfect Storm of Halloween 1991 was also such a hybrid.
They can still have fronts, but at the center a shallow warm core, and in some seasons with the right conditions, they can become fully tropical. And they can be really quite intense.
These storms blur the lines between tropical and nontropical. One in December 1994 was damaging across New England, striking at Christmas time. And when you examine the weather map for it, you see it was unusually warm all around it.
Weatherwise Magazine (oh yes, there’s a magazine all about the weather. I used to get it as a kid) wrote an article about it in 1995. In addition, the Hurricane Center may very well add “Hurricane Santa” to its list of tropical or subtropical storms when it gets to 1994 in its ongoing hurricane reanalysis project. I’d be surprised if it didn’t.
Why is this important? Well, I and others think these kind of storms are far more common than people realize. These are intense storms that usually stay out at sea, not interacting with land. They do disrupt shipping. But there are a few places in the world where they do interact with land—the east coast of Australia, Western Europe, and the West Coast of the US. In addition, the occasional cruise ship sails into one, as what happened earlier this year, as I believe that storm was in the same class.
And they likely will be becoming more common, with warming seas in all seasons. See Hurricane Alex for example.
Alex started as a non tropical storm over the Bahamas. Models indicated, well, things could get interesting. The weather weenie world certainly noticed.
The storm blew northeast and then separated from the jet stream and then moved southeast where it encountered conditions that enabled it to become a subtropical storm, and then a healthy looking hurricane. But sea surface temps never were enough to actually support a hurricane. It intensified because in the upper troposphere, there were colder than average temperatures, which created atmospheric instability. Basically it derived its energy from the atmosphere around it and not the ocean below it.
Storms like Alex sometimes form in the Mediterranean. They are called medicanes and are extremely small scale. They aren’t really formally tracked despite being damaging. Their names are part of various European national extratropical storm naming schemes, something that is and will come to the United States. Medicanes are interesting and deserve much more research time.
But my point is, well one of them, these storms are pretty worthy of names, especially since they very well may increase in number in the future thanks to our warming planet, which we all know why it’s warming.
Next Wednesday: 2016 Hurricane Forecast. We’ll cover the Atlantic, the Eastern Pacific, and Hawaii. None of it looks good, I don’t think, and you’ve already seen one excellent and rightly scary preview from FishOutOfWater (and if you haven’t, go and read it.)
OTHER LINKS
- Mount Saint Helens is rumbling. The volcano last erupted in 2008 and anyone who says it’s been since 1980 has zero clue as to what they’re talking about. I suspect if it does erupt this year, it will be similar to its 2004-2008 sequence.
- British Columbia is on fire too. As for Fort McMurray, I am struck at how isolated the city is, surrounded for hundreds of miles in all directions with boreal forests. The fires have a likely clear AGW signal to them (and very well could be arson), but fire is a part of the life cycle of many tree species in boreal regions, and it was a matter of time even without climate change that they’d burn. (As I wrote this on Saturday evening, the fires in BC and Alberta may be out—or contained-- by the time this is published.) Please check out this post from Dr. Grenci on the fires, as well as this post from joeknapp. Two young people were killed in an accident during the frenzied evacuation of the city last week. This is a really great post about the big picture behind the fires. By the way, the fire is fucking huge.
Meanwhile, the New Jersey Pine Barrens are scary as hell, as DarkScholar82 writes this week. We should consider doing a series on wildfires for the Weather Center---all who wish to contribute let me know.
- This article explains the science behind the flurry of articles about the southern segment of the San Andreas Fault that you might have read in the last week or so.