Parts of the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf could be slammed by strong to severe thunderstorms Thursday, bringing the potential for damaging winds, destructive hail and a few tornadoes.
"These improvements empower communities to prepare earlier and more effectively for dangerous hazards from tropical storms and hurricanes," said Michael Brennan, director of NOAA's National Hurricane Center.
In Grazalema, Spain's wettest town, a year's-worth of rain fell in a fortnight and overloaded the karst aquifer beneath it. Water rushed into homes through floors, walls and even electricity sockets. Authorities ordered everyone to evacuate. I felt a lot of fear, said Sanchez Barea, a guesthouse owner whose home is one of hundreds still in an exclusion zone.
But what, exactly, is a blizzard? A blizzard doesn't always mean "a lot of snow," though it can certainly bring heavy snowfalls, as this storm is expected to along parts of the East Coast. Rather, the National Weather Service defines it as a snowstorm with winds regularly above 35 miles per hour and "considerable falling" or blowing snow for at least three hours.
When I spoke with emergency management officials last year, they all mentioned the same frustrating scenario. People ignore storm warnings until the precipitation starts falling, then suddenly everyone rushes out at once. The roads become congested with anxious drivers, accidents spike, and stores run out of essentials just when people need them most. But here's what really gets meteorologists worked up about this pattern. Modern weather forecasting has become incredibly accurate, especially for major winter storms.
A deep area of low pressure to the south-east of New Zealand's North Island swept into the region on Sunday, bringing heavy rain, gale-force winds and dangerous coastal swells that lashed exposed shorelines. The storm triggered power outages, forced evacuations and damaged infrastructure, with further impacts likely on Monday as the system lingers for a time, before tracking southwards later.
Intensely cold air is scouring the central and eastern U.S. again and will send temperatures plummeting all the way to the tip of Florida. Along with this new Arctic incursion, a major bomb cyclone storm is strengthening off the coast of the Carolinas, potentially bringing rare blizzard conditions to the region. Some areas haven't seen this amount of accumulating snow in over 30 years, wrote the National Weather Service's office in Wilmington, N.C., on Facebook.
I look at weather.gov a lot. It's not that I need to, for any reason. It's kind of like a tic, or perhaps more accurately, a low-stakes dopamine search. So, the past few days have been somewhat amusing, because the home page of that site was particularly colorful - pinks, light blues, dark blues, purples - for much of the continental United States. Most of my family lives in California; it was fun to send them screenshots going "Hey, most of the country has to deal with this" while they stay blissfully unaware of pretty much anything that isn't within a narrow band of temperatures.
