Tornado hits France; unprecedented April heat in Europe
A rare EF-1 tornado with 73 - 112 mph winds (117 - 180 kph) hit Toulouse, France on Sunday, causing minor damage that included collapsed walls, uprooted trees, and cars moved out of place. The tornado touched down 15 - 20 km south of Toulouse in Southwest France at 7:10 pm local time, and baseball-sized hail (4 cm) also hit the region. According to the European Severe Weather Database (ESWD), this was the first tornado in France in 2012. French tornadoes are rare; there were just three tornadoes in the country in 2011. The European Severe Weather Database (ESWD) (as summarized by Wikipedia) lists 15 tornadoes for all of Europe so far in 2012. Most of the twisters (nine) were in Turkey. For comparison, an average of 495 tornadoes touched down in the U.S. during the period January - April over the years 2009 - 2011. A key reason for the lack of tornadoes in Europe is that the atmosphere is usually not unstable enough. Tornadoes require warm, moist, low-density air near the surface, and cold, dry, high-density air aloft to provide a lot of instability. The Baltic Sea and North Sea to the north of Europe moderate cold air flowing south from the pole, reducing the amount of instability over Europe.
Video 1. A rare French tornado kicks up dust near Toulouse, France on April 29, 2012.
Unprecedented April heat hits Central and Eastern Europe
A European heat wave of unparalleled intensity for so early in the year smashed all-time April heat records over much of Central and Eastern Europe on Saturday and Sunday. According to wunderground's weather historian Christopher C. Burt, and weather records researcher Maximiliano Herrera, new national April heat records were set in Belarus, Germany, Austria, Lithuania, Moldova, and Poland, and hundreds of stations in Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Hungary, Moldova, Romania, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Russia recorded their hottest April temperatures on record. Moscow hit 28.6°C (84°F) on Sunday, the hottest April reading in the city since record keeping began 130 years ago. The culprit for the heat wave and French tornado is a large low pressure system off the coast of France whose counter-clockwise flow has been pumping hot air from the Sahara Desert northwards into Europe. The low is expected to continue to bring unusually hot weather to most of Central and Eastern Europe for the remainder of the week.
New all-time April national heat records set over the past few days:
Poland: 31.7°C (89.18°F) at Tomaszow on 4/29
Germany: 32.2°C (90.0°F) at Munich on 4/28
Austria: 31.8°C (89.2°F) at Ranshoten on 4/28
Belarus: 30.4°C ( 86.7°F) at Zitovici on 4/29
Moldova 32.5°C
Lithuania
Jeff Masters
Reader Comments
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Yep, and here is the chart.
Be hold the CHART
Link
and then moving back inland to SC and riding back up the coast
It's definitely moving toward the NNE or NE but the problem maybe the dry air in the upper levels over FL eventhough dewpoints are in the low 70's at the surface but above at like 10,000 feet the air is very dry so we will see.
Seems the "Season" is under way.
Please.. :P
Are you taking IB?
I am, and I got Biology, Chemistry, English, Math, Spanish, Geography exams June 4th - June 7th.
Plus I got SAT this saturday (no pun intended).
It is situated right on the Eastern boundry of a very dry upper level Tutt cell which is probably enhancing the current convection but it may not last. It is basically boxed in between the Tutt cell (and very dry air to the left) and the Peninsula of Florida to the West. Like the old song by Dr. John; " I was in the right place, but it must have been the wrong time"....
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Nice idea for your main Blog-topic. And a nice presentation: nice enough to make me wonder whether you might be running afoul of copyright restrictions.
If you're not doing so already, a month between new bloggings on the topic gives you time to write your own thoughts about the most interesting points made in the author's chapters.
Since he appears to have written a chapter on Nitrates, I'm surprised at his failure to mention the possibility of an upcoming Phosphate Crisis as a boundary.
(I win)
You're a weather junkie like us but you are in totally different field of work, like a 360 opposite type of interest
Hey Boss. Hopefully, the Gulf will not be threatened by a Major this year so you will have some left over for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Waiting for the crow, fresca and the chart in 20 minutes oooohhj
And this is the whole thing in a nutshell. Meteorology is the chaos theory in action, dealing mostly in probabilities. We've taken the physical/chemical foundations of our planet, specifically, ozone loss, ramping up the ppm of everything in our atmosphere, blasting deep into the mantle, injecting chemicals into the atmosphere to geo-engineer the climate...and then get excited when the chaos ramps up too. Chaos is. Wouldn't we be excited to experience mega chaos from the hand of nature? If we can do it, she certainly can. And it is that propitious moment, 2012.
Question: I see the dust is blowing at us from east (Sahara) and west (China) simultaneously. This is normal to a degree, but who can elaborate on its affects to North America's current climate situation. Are the winds stronger this time around? I find it curiously interesting, plus aren't we transitioning to El Nino at the same time.
Oh I hope so.
The Gulf Coast has really come a long way since 05.
We all need to consider our preps and evacuation plans as soon as possible.
It's the best Hedge bet on calamity...preparation.
"360 opposite", huh? I'm so opposite I'm exactly identical? hehe
And yes, I freely admit I'm a weather junkie like the rest of you.
If that system shut down today, winter temperatures in the North Atlantic region would fall by 20 or more degrees Fahrenheit within 10 years. Dublin would acquire the climate of Spitsbergen, 600 miles north of the Arctic Circle.
"The consequences could be devastating," said Wallace S. Broecker, Newberry Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and author of the new research, which appeared in the Nov. 28 issue of the magazine Science.
A complex of globally interconnected ocean currents, collectively known as the Conveyor, governs our climate by transporting heat and moisture around the planet. But the Conveyor is delicately balanced and vulnerable, and it has shut down or changed direction many times in Earth's history, Broecker reports. Each time the Conveyor has shifted gears, it has caused significant global temperature changes within decades, as well as large-scale wind shifts, dramatic fluctuations in atmospheric dust levels, glacial advances or retreats and other changes over many regions of the Earth, he said.
The Conveyor "is the Achilles heel of the climate system," Broecker wrote in Science. "The record ... indicates that this current has not run steadily, but jumped from one mode of operation to another. The changes in climate associated with these jumps have now been shown to be large, abrupt and global."
The ongoing accumulation of heat-trapping industrial gases blanketing the Earth threatens to raise global temperatures, he said, but such a rise would occur gradually. Far more worrisome is the buildup's potential to stress the climate system past a crucial threshold that would disrupt the Conveyor and set off a rapid reconfiguration of Earth's climate, predicted by existing computer models.
Broecker also offered a new theory: Scientists generally agree that periodic changes in Earth's orbit and the amount of solar radiation it receives have paced fundamental climate changes on the planet over millions of years. But the global climatic flip-flops may have been set in motion by sudden switches in the operation of the Conveyor.
Today, the driving force of the Conveyor is the cold, salty water of the North Atlantic Ocean. Such water is more dense than warm, fresh water and hence sinks to the ocean bottom, pushing water through the world's oceans like a great plunger. The volume of this deep undersea current is 16 times greater than the flow of all the world's rivers combined, Broecker said, and it runs southward all the way to the southern tip of Africa, where it joins a watery raceway that circles Antarctica. Here the Conveyor is recharged by cold, salty water created by the formation of sea ice, which leaves salt behind when it freezes. This renewed sinking shoves water back northward, where it gradually warms again and rises to the surface in the Pacific and Indian oceans.
In the Indian Ocean, surface waters are too warm to sink. Northern Pacific waters are cold, but not salty enough to sink into the deep. This is primarily because prevailing winds that whip around the planet hit the great mountains of the western United States and Canada and drop their moisture. The resulting snow and rain runs into the Pacific, adding a dose of fresh water that dilutes the Pacific's saltiness, said Broecker
Today, the Conveyor comes full circle, eventually propelling warm surface waters, including the Gulf Stream, back into the North Atlantic. In winter, warm water transfers its heat to the frigid overlying air masses that come off ice-covered Canada, Greenland and Iceland. The eastward-moving air masses make northern Europe warmer in winter than comparable latitudes in North America. Without the Gulf Stream, nothing would temper the Arctic air, and Europe would enter a deep freeze.
A summary of the path of the thermohaline circulation/ Great Ocean Conveyor. Blue paths represent deep-water currents, while red paths represent surface currents
It's the best Hedge bet on calamity...preparation.
Hence the early delivery of the Fresca supply.
Gulf coast is pretty resilient
It will probably (hopefully) not happen in our lifetime but that is the big-ticket issue/game changer in terms of global climate change if you can definitively isolate a cause and effect between greenhouse emissions and the ocean circulations. With that being said, it has happened many times in the past due to natural earth cycles (Ice Ages as an example). The Gulf Stream is the prefect example.
Sorry 180
DIAGNOSTIC DISCUSSION
Excerpt:
ENSO Alert System Status: Final La Niña Advisory
Synopsis: La Niña has transitioned to ENSO-neutral conditions, which are expected to continue through northern summer 2012.
A minor series of glaciations occurred from 460 Ma to 430 Ma. There were extensive glaciations from 350 to 250 Ma. The current ice age, called the Quaternary glaciation, has seen more or less extensive glaciation on 40,000 and later, 100,000 year cycles.
Though there are differing theories still out on to what triggered the start and end of the event, it still amazes me of just how quickly the global temperature dropped and increased in a matter of decades, though the event itself last nearly
10,800 B.C. and 9,500 B.C.
Department of Oceanography Texas A&M University
Hope y'all get your rain. We managed to get a few clouds and thunder and lightning last year. And not a drop of rain. Still got my fingers crossed that the sea breeze showers return this year.
We had some brief heavy rain here yesterday, about 0.25, sure wasn't much, but it's better than nothing, I also got 0.61 on Sunday, so we are getting a few small sea breeze storms here and there lately at my place.
Windmills don't work that way
I went through Andrew. Slow La Nina year with 10 total storms but the "A" storm that did not form until late August was all she wrote; and a rapid intensification nightmare at that...............
The issue is not whether it will dry out or not. What you see there with that complex of convection is an elongated low level convergence zone. If you didn't noticed before, very dry air aloft was once present there, that is until significant low level convergence eventually forced the higher surface moisture upward, therefore moistening the environment.
Because of that, it is possible for that area of thunderstorms to make it to Florida, however, I doubt it will stricly for the fact that the near shore waters become highly unfavorable for thunderstorms during the day, and those convergent zones only last so long, and as it approaches Florida the changes in wind direction with height would most likely disrupt the convergence focus.
Most people forget just how big of an influence the daily cycle is. What I mean by that is the land is more favorable for convection over land during the day, and less during the night. However, over water it is the opposite, it is more favorable over water at night and less during the day. This is even more extreme with the near shore waters. In case anyone noticed, thunderstorms during the day in the gulf always weaken dramatically as they reach the near shore waters, regardless of how overall favorable the atmosphere is for convection. However, the prime time for thunderstorms off the water here on the west cost of Florida is between 3 AM and 9 AM. The time frame isn't always like I said, but you get the idea.
Total moisture through the column:
You a good Man Jed with a nicely explained correction to my comment; that is why were are here (to learn from one another).........Your informed comment and tact is greatly appreciated............ :)
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I thought GFS was predicting that a Low would develop in the middle of the line where the Bermuda-AzoresHigh normally wanders. Has GFS changed its mind?
No it still develops it..I posted a picture of it in one of my previous posts off the east coast and one heading to bermuda
Shows just how fast that happened
thank you! And BTW, I didn't intend to belittle anything you said, I just love to teach what I love!
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