Tag Archives: derecho

Colorado Fires, East Coast Storms

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Two people are dead in the Colorado Springs area due to the Black Forest fire, which continues to rage virtually unchecked about five miles northeast of Colorado’s second largest city (population 400,000.) The fire’ had burned through 15,700 acres by late Thursday afternoon, and was 5% contained. Over 38,000 people in 13,000 homes had been evacuated. The weather was no help on Thursday, as afternoon temperatures spiked to 90°, winds were sustained at 33 mph, gusting to 40 mph, and the humidity dropped as low as 14%. The fire began on Tuesday, June 11, during a record heat wave. Colorado Springs hit 98° on June 10–the city’s hottest temperature ever recorded so early in the year. The temperature topped out at 97° on June 11. The extreme heat, combined with the extreme drought gripping the region, made for ideal fire conditions. Fire conditions will not be as dangerous in the Colorado Springs area on Friday, as a weak cold front is expected to pass through the region during the afternoon, bringing cooler temperatures and increased humidity. Strong winds may still be a problem, though.


Figure 1. The Black Forest Fire burns behind a stand of trees on June 12, 2013, near Colorado Springs, Colo. (Chris Schneider/Getty Images)


Figure 2. Aerial view of a Colorado Springs neighborhood burned in the Black Forest Fire on June 13, 2013. (Image: AP Photo/John Wark)

The three most expensive fires in Colorado history have all occurred in the past year
The 360 homes burned by this week’s Black Canyon fire are the most ever destroyed in Colorado by a fire, and will likely make it the most expensive fire in Colorado history. The previous record was the $353 million Waldo Canyon fire of June 23 – July 10, 2012. That fire killed two people, destroyed 347 homes, forced the evacuation of over 32,000 people, and burned 18,247 acres of land. The High Park fire of June, 2012, which destroyed 259 buildings near Fort Collins, now ranks as the third most expensive Colorado fire (it was the most expensive one at the time.) The Black Forest fire has a long ways to go if it wants to challenge the 2002 Hayman Fire as the largest fire in Colorado history. The Hayman fire burned 138,000 acres, an area about nine times as large as this week’s Black Forest fire.

According to a federal report released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2012, Colorado can expect to see a sharp increase in wildfires during the coming decades, if the climate warms as expected. The report cited research predicting that a 1.8°F increase in Colorado’s average temperature–the level of warming expected by 2050 under a moderate global warming scenario–would cause a factor of 2.8 – 6.6 increase in fire area burned in the state.

Video 1. Aerial view of the Colorado Springs Black Forest fire on June 11, 2013.

Severe thunderstorms pound the Mid-Atlantic
It was another intense day of severe thunderstorm activity for the Mid-Atlantic region on Thursday. A child was killed in Virginia by a falling tree, and at least three people were injured in Albemarle, North Carolina when a violent thunderstorm blew trees onto homes. NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center (SPC) logged 376 reports of damaging thunderstorm wind gusts in the 15 hours ending at 11:25 pm EDT Thursday night, and three of these gusts were 74 mph or greater. SPC is now acknowledging that Wednesday’s bow echo that traveled 600 miles from Indiana to New Jersey was a low-end derecho, with over 150 damaging wind reports. The most impressive thunderstorm winds from the derecho occurred in Wabash County, Indiana, where a “macroburst” produced winds of 90 – 100 mph across an area seven miles long and three miles wide, destroying three buildings and causing extensive tree damage. Total damage from the two-day severe weather outbreak over the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic will likely run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.


Figure 3. Severe weather reports for the 15 hours ending at 11:25 pm EDT June 14, 2013, from SPC.


Figure 4. Radar composite of the June 12 – 13 bow echo that traveled from Indiana to new Jersey. Image credit: NOAA/SPC.

from:    http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/show.html

New Words for Wednesday

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Wednesday Words: Czarinas, Derecho Storms and More

NewsFeed’s weekly highlight of our vocabulary includes useful, new, hilarious and surprising words (as well as some that are just fun to roll off the old tongue).
By Katy Steinmetz | @katysteinmetz | July 4, 2012
David McGlynn

David McGlynn

czarina (n.): a chic Russian female who has gained attention as a customer, designer, etc., of high fashion. The New York Times‘ Eric Wilson writes of the czarinas’ return to the haute scene, describing them as “a pack of fabulous-looking young women” more striking than Vladimir Putin in a zoot suit. Compare to: gallerinas, the fabulous ladies of the American art scene; and princelings, arguably less aesthetically pleasing but plenty powerful players in Chinese institutions.

banksterism (n.): financial practices that are pejoratively likened to the behavior of gangsters. A member of British Parliament got some attention this week when he used this word in the House of Commons. “The public believe that Parliament and parties have indulged the banksterism that is now all too apparent,” Mark Durkan quipped. Some reporters thought he was the first, but the term has been around since the Great Depression, when Americans were similarly disillusioned with Wall Street. A Montana Senator leveled the label during the Pecora hearings of 1932, when bankers were grilled over their potential role in the collapse. “The best way to restore confidence in the banks,” he said, “would be to take these crooked presidents out … and treat them the same way we treated Al Capone when he failed to pay his income tax.” Zing!

derecho (n.): a large cluster of thunderstorms that produces widespread wind damage. This term spread as news outlets rushed to explain exactly what hit residents with extreme winds and power outages along the East Coast on June 29. “An ordinary thunderstorm produces a swath of damaging winds usually only a mile or two wide and a few miles long,” the Weather Channel said in a post last month, “but derechoes can produce damage swaths tens of miles wide and several hundred miles long.” The word means straight in Spanish, a reference to the long lines of wind damage the storms can leave behind. (On a lighter note, derecho–deh-REH-choh–also seems like a fine term for disappointingly low-quality nachos.

skeuomorph (n.): an object or feature which imitates the design of a similar artifact in another material. The Brooklyn Brainery, a community teaching organization, recently delved into a dire foodie mystery: why do so many maple syrup canisters have “tiny, useless handles”? (See their article and picture here.) Their answer was that this ostentation used to be practical–when the jars and handles were bigger–and is now a mere skeuomorph. This history bears further investigation, but the word is excellent regardless–much like the vision of a world in which maple syrup is only consumed from five-gallon containers. Just think of the pancakes.

scrub (n.): a lout, a failure, a dirty or unpleasant person or thing. Flavorwire did a fun roundup of slang-that’s-older-than-you’d-think, and one of their words is scrub. As in “Girl, you know I don’t want none.” Writer Emily Temple dates the term back to 1580s with an online etymology dictionary; Green’s Dictionary of Slang, from which this definition comes, dates their first entry at 1698. Other scrubby terms from Green’s include scrub turkey, an itinerant who moves around the Australian bush; and scrubbado, “a general term of abuse.” As in, “Scrubbado you meddling kids, and your dog, too!”

Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/07/04/wednesday-words-czarinas-derecho-storms-and-more/#ixzz1zfzP8Jqd