Nice Afternoon Light For A November Windstorm

This afternoon up in St. Albans, Vermont, we had a TON of wind. I'd say it gusted to at least 50 mph.

Trees in my yard in St. Albans, Vermont, are tossed in strong,
50 mph wind gusts as they are lit up in a golden color by
the setting sun.  Beautiful!  

Toward evening, the setting sun lit up the trees rocking in the gales.

I took a quick iPhone video of it. It's not the greatest quality but you get the idea of the dramatic beauty of the brightly lit storm.

(I also took some video with my higher quality Canon Rebel camera, but I haven't had a chance to look to see if that video is workable yet.

Anyway, here's the iPhone video to give you an idea. I love light and drama. Hope you do to.

Another Storm in Vermont, More Dramatic Photographs

The endless parade of big, destructive thunderstorms plaguing Vermont this summer continued last night as another squall line came through, tossing down God knows how many trees and power lines as it roared across the northern half of the state last night.

As clouds began to gather, it gave the atmospher a tropical
feel as people got the last of their fishing in.  

It seems the power companies are always out untangling their fallen lines, chain saws are constantly buzzing and everybody is always shoring up the roads washing out in the downpours.

Last evening, I was at St. Albans Bay, on Lake Champlain in northern Vermont when the storms came through.

The blast of clouds, wind and lightning didn't cause much damage around St. Albans, but it sure made for some great photos.

Ahead of the storm the sun's rays struggled
against the oncoming dark clouds 

The shelf cloud in front of the storm looks like Jaws
ready to eat the bay.  

The storm gets closer, the sky gets darker

The shelf cloud visible as the storm approached and a sign the storm would pack a punch,  was something to behold.

The roiling storm clouds take over the sky.

The storm takes over. I run inside.

The storm doesn't last long, and the sky gets
peaceful again at sunset.  

Vermont's Weather Is Horrible, But The Clouds Are Interesting

It's been a terribly stormy week in Vermont. Amid high humidity, thunderstorms have erupted and rain has poured down  every day.

Dramatic thundestorm clouds up the
road from my St. Albans, Vermont home
this week.  

There's been flash floods, high water, lightning, wind, hail, and not much sun.  Summertime in Vermont!

This Friday morning, we're all grateful that it's only raining kind of hard. You take what you can get. They'd forecasted an epic flood for us today but we only got minor bits of high water.  So I suppose we're lucky.

They're telling us this wet weather will last several more days. Each day, somebody, some town in Vermont will get a flash flood from a heavy thunderstorm, we're told. We don't know where. It's the luck of the draw.

Houses on some unlucky street in Vermont will have water pouring into their basements, while their neighbors a couple miles away will be taking items off the clothesline because it is starting to sprinkle. Just random.

At least some of the clouds have been interesting. Monday night, a thunderstorm rapidly approached my house in St. Albans. Vermont. Judging from the clouds, it looked like my luck would run out. Would there be a tornado? Hurricane force winds? A flood?

Nah. Just some dramatic clouds, a few grumbles of thunder, a cooling breeze and a brief downpour. I got lucky again. And I got some good cloud photos, as you can see in the post.

Another view of dramatic storm clouds near
my St. Albans, Vt. home this week.

Also, here at the bottom of this blog post thingy, is a video I took of those clouds coming over my house Monday night. I was really glad I was able to watch them.

Comparing Sandy and the Ongoing New England Blizzard

Maybe it's because I'm a weather geek, but I found two really intriguing satellite photos today. One shows Superstorm Sandy in late October, and the other shows today's blizzard gathering strength near the East Coast.

A satellite photo of Superstorm Sandy,
October, 2012 Norw rhe weather front coming in from the west.

In both cases, the vast storm systems really intensified off the East Coast. In both satellite photos, a storm coming from the west across the United States was about to be absorbed by the offshore storm, and would make each tempest that much stronger.

It's interesting that both Sandy and the current blizzard are both immense, record breaking, super strong storms, and both satellite photos are so comparable and show similar weather scenarios playing out.

Obviously, Sandy and today's blizzard are different from each other, having developed differently.  During Sandy, the builk of the destruction was in New Jersey and the New York metro area, and most of the damage was from a storm surge.  There was some snow during Sandy, particularly in West Virginia, but that wasn't the main feature of Sandy

During this storm, the main problem is snow. And the focus of the blizzard is New England, not New Jersey and New York. There is the risk of severe coastal flooding in Massachusetts, and there will be a lot of damage, but it won't be as bad as Sandy in that regard.

Blizard of '13 growing off the East Coast Friday. Similar to
Sandy note the weather front coming in from the west

I live in Vermont. During Sandy, Vermont got some effects, with some relatively minor wind damage and some power failures.

In this blizzard, we're getting a fair amount of snow, probably amounting to a foot on average. But that's not too extreme for Vermont. The snow is probably doing more good than harm because the ski resorts will surely benefit from this.

I don't know if the similarities in the two storms have any significance. But it's fascinating to see weather history, at least in part, repeat itself.

Typhoon Sends Car Flying in Okinawa

I shouldn't have complained about the dark, chilly, drizzly, rainy, foggy weather that gripped Vermont all weekend, blocking views of the fall foliage and prompting me to turn on the heat in my house for the first time this season.

It could have been worse. Okinawa, Japan dealt with Typhoon Jelawat, which, as typhoons do, caused a lot of wind, to say the least. Below is a video that shows how the wind affected an Okinawa parking lot. Those light weight cars don't do well in typhoons, apparently. Video credit goes to JD Keeling.

Typhoon Jelawat might have its last laugh here in Vermont. Usually about 10 days after Japan gets a nasty typhoon in the autumn, weather patterns are affected and we get a cold wave here.  Long range forecasts suggest it will snow the middle of next week. (eek!)

Meanwhile, be glad you weren't in the white car in the video:

A Late Summer Vermont Storm Chase

Usually by now in Vermont, severe thunderstorm season is over, and so is my bizarre hobby of pursuing said storms in my truck.

But a big cold front hit the East Coast Saturday, causing widespread storms and even dropping a couple of tornadoes on Queens and Brooklyn.

Nothing that dramatic here in Vermont, but the squall line did create a good blast of wind, if just for a few minutes.

It wasn't the wildest storm of the summer, but as you can see from the video, at least it was semi-dramatic in Charlotte, Vermont, near the ferry dock along Lake Champlain. The wind and the rain in the video will probably have to tide me over until the next severe thunderstorm season, which will start in the spring.

I'll guess I'll have to transition to snow/ice videos soon. Here's the the Charlotte squall line video for your enjoyment:

Vermont Sadness A Year After Irene

It's been a year since Hurricane Irene trashed Vermont. In just a day, hundreds of homes drowned in floods that came on so suddenly that some people didn't have time to flee. Businesses drowned, or simply washed away that Sunday.

This mobile home near Saxtons River, Vt.
lies in ruins in August, 2012, a year after Irene.

Big chunks of Vermont's road network fragmented into short stretches of pavement interspersed with yawning canyons where culverts and bridges had been the day before.

At least five Vermonters died in Irene's onslaught on August 28, 2011. Perhaps only the Great Flood of 1927 was a worse disaster for the Green Mountain State.

The post-Irene cleanup went fast. Armies of volunteers swarmed swamped neighborhoods, doing their best to put the pieces back together. The state's road crews fixed the roads in a flash. Most were paved and smooth by the fall foliage tourism season, which came only a little over a month after Irene.

Now, if you drive through the towns hit hardest by Irene, you could almost believe the disaster never happened.

A sad sign on a flood damaged house near Plymouth, Vermont
in a photo taken about a year after Hurricane Irene
wrecked the home.

What were mud caked streets last August are tidy lanes, with perfect flowers in perfect planters on perfect sidewalks in front of perfect gift shops which greet, well, imperfect but still very welcomed tourists.

Restaurants are open and look like they're thriving. Houses have been repaired. Fresh white paint gleams on clapboards. Homeowners have long since finished cleaning muck from the basement and gutting soggy rooms. They are now busy tending neatly trimmed lawns and foisting bumper crops of zucchini from their gardens onto their neighbors.

Except.

This sign was still up at a wrecked farmstand
near Plymouth, Vermont in August, 2012, nearly
a year after Irene.

It's jarring when you turn a corner and see it. The wreckage of the epic flood. It's still there in spots.  A sagging tilted houses amid a sea of gravel, left just as they were the minute the water receded after the rains of August 28, 2011 ended. Twisted metal knotted around dead trees, representing what was once somebody's mobile home. A shed deposited upside down in the middle of a field.

These scenes are even more jarring than they were right after the storm because they seem so out of place amid the newly repaired villages and streets.

You wonder why the wreckage is still there.

And you know, as anyone opening the pages of Vermont's Burlington Free Press this morning can attest, the disaster continues. 

In Stockbridge, an old farmhouse still lies tilted and warped in a ditch where the rushing waters of Irene deposited it. The house became a widely photographed iconic image of Vermont's Irene disaster. The roofline of the house remains perfectly even. The shades in the unbroken second floor windows are closed, as if the occupant in the house has decided to take an afternoon nap. But the bottom of the house is bowed out,, and the whole structure tilts precariously, as if trying to outdo the Tower of Pisa.

This house in Stockbridge, Vermont, became an
iconic image after the Hurricane Irene disaster
last year. This photo was taken two weeks ago, nearly
a year after Irene.

Poignant signs are still attached to some wrecked properties. "Please keep out. Irene already robbed us" is spray painted on a boarded up house window near Plymouth, Vermont. The scrawl hints at creepy opportunists who used a person's tragedy to steal from them and just make things worse.

Another sign invited people to take pictures of the wreckage. Maybe that would help them gain attention, and maybe help the rebuild. A year after the storm, they so far haven't rebuilt.

Another hurricane is bearing down on the United States as I write this. New Orleans, again. It's seven years since Katrina wrecked New Orleans and they still haven't fully recovered.

Nobody deserves a disaster, to lose their homes, their livlihood, their sense of place. Let's hope that if it happens, nobody stays in limbo for a long time afterwards, like victims of Katrina, or a few unlucky people in Vermont who were blindsided by an ugly rainstorm named Irene.

Storm Has Me Playing Pick Up Sticks

Another round of severe thunderstorms rolled through Vermont Monday evening. All these storms had missed my house this summer, until Monday.

A great gush of wind and rain slammed St. Albans, tossing down trees across streets and highways, cutting power, and making a general mess.

This dead tree fell on my property during Monday's storm
It dropped in a perfect location to avoid damage and allow
easy cleanup

When I arrived home shortly after the storm ended, I found my property here in St. Albans was pretty much unscathed. One dead tree toppled. It was one I was going to cut down anyway, and it fell in the exact spot where I was going to drop it. Perfect.

Tuesday, though, it was a game of pick of sticks on my acre of property. On closer inspection, I found twigs everywhere. I had to get rid of them, because they would have interfered with lawn mowing, and looked crummy in the garden beds.

As I picked up the sticks, dozens of them, it felt a little like fall cleanup. It seemed that summer had reached its midpoint, and the first hints of fall were there.

Yes, it was relatively warm and humid, typical July weather. Sometimes, the sky looked like summer, with billowy clouds spitting out showers. Other times, the sky had a November feel, that look you get on the first cold day, when there's been snow flurries, and the ground is hardening with frost.

A gusty wind from the northwest blew all day, too. Unusual for July. It was a warm wind, but it's almost never windy from the northwest in the summer.

I collected this pile of twigs as I cleaned up after Monday's storm.
Beer bottle is there for scale.

We have plenty of summer left. So it's not like I've put the season aside. My day lilies are still blooming nicely, everything is nice and green and will stay that way for awhile.

But Monday's storm was a ceremony. It marked the midpoint of summer in electric fashion, and sometime fairly soon, we'll have to start thinking about autumn.

I took a video of the storm as it blasted St. Albans. It's below:

Storm, NYC Style: Cigarette Butts Attack

Up here in Vermont, it hasn't rained much this summer, but when it has, we tended to get violent storms with high winds that push down trees, lightning that starts fires, torrential rains that turn streets into rivers, and hail that pelts gardens into pulp.

But, we should consider ourselves lucky. In New York, they had a bad thunderstorm Wednesday, which filled subway stations with disgusting water laced with rat crap and urine (and people walked through it anyway, YUCK!)

At least Vermont storms are a bit cleaner than those in the Big Apple, no? As proof, I offer you this video of an overwhelmed subway drain during the storm geysering water and lots and lots of old cigarette butts.

Look at it this way: The video is a good incentive to stop smoking for those of you who do indulge:

Wild Storm Chase, Burlington, Vermont, 7/4/12

The Fourth of July in Vermont had some fireworks that no pyrotechnic company could beat.

Incredibly intense thunderstorms roared down from southern Canada, and as alwasy, I set about storm chasing as the weather developed.  I always have to collect more weather porn, don't you know.  And belatedly on the Fourth, I got some real money shots from the weather.

Burlington Free Press phototgrapher Glenn Russell
documents flooding in downtown Burlington
after a wild July 4 storm.

At midafternoon, one complex of storms formed just north of the Canadian border, a little above northwestern Vermont. It appeared the storms were heading right toward my St. Albans, Vermont house, so all I had to do is sit and wait with my camera and intercept them.

Nope. They storms veered to the east, despite the dire severe storm warnings for St. Albans. I couldn't catch up with the storms as they headed toward Danville, Vermont, in the northeastern part of the state.

I had to give up the chase.

The area around famed Joe's Pond in Danville was hammered with fallen trees, overturned boats and lots of damage.

I thought I missed all the storms, until I saw on radar that another complex formed northwest of Montreal.

I wondered it the storm would hold together, and boy did it ever. It formed a "bow echo" on radar a backward "C' shape that portended trouble.

Flooding on South Union Street in Burlington after
a very severe thunderstorm on July 4. 

This one kept further west than I thought.  As I raced south to intercept it as I saw going by to my west, the storm raced south over Lake Champlain, finally making a beeline toward Burlington, Vermont.

Burlington got hammered with 60 to 70 mph wind gusts that knocked down lots of trees. Even worse was the incredible amount of rain that fell in a short period of time. Lots of streets flooded, as did cars, business and homes.

Sadly, a building that takes in homeless people during the day for meals and help got trashed by the flooding, according to the Burlington Free Press. 

Here's the film of the storm I took on Burlington's Riverside Avenue. This wasn't taken through a fogged up window. The visibility was really that bad, it was raining so hard:

Bang! Lightning Strikes Close

I was out watching the thunderstorms that rumbled through Vermont Friday. I always do that, weather geek that I am.  I always go to these storms well armed with camera equipment.

Talk about turning the video camera to a new view at the right moment. Watch the video. (It needs editing, I might put up a new version later. Skip to just before the 0:40 mark and enjoy!

Vermont is Tornado Alley?

Yesterday, here in Vermont, we had all kinds of tornado watches and warnings, as if this were Kansas or some damn place.

Auntie Em! Auntie Em!

A tree fell on this guy's house during a
severe thunderstorm in Milton, Vt.
Tuesday. One branch got stuck on the
home's nice turret

So far, there have been no confirmed reports of Vermont tornadoes, but there was plenty of hail, wind damage, flash floods, fires caused by lightning and other mayhem, as I reported today in the Burlington Free Press.

Yes, I know stormy weather is a pain in the ass for a lot of people, but as regular readers know, I do love big storms. I got to chase a few of them yesterday.

I missed out on a Midwest-style supercell thunderstorm that went across the northern part of the state. The storm started hinting that it wanted to drop a tornado when it was a couple miles north of my St. Albans, Vermont house. It kept wanting to drop a twister as it traveled 50 miles toward the northeastern part of the state, but it didn't quite produce a tornado. Just as well.

I did get to enjoy a severe thunderstorm in the town of Milton, Vermont, as the two videos below show.

In the first one, I love the dude that comes in at around 2:18 nonchalantly walking in the swirling gusts and drowing lane. The second video is especially amateurish as you get a lovely view of my truck dashboard as I moved out of a driveway into a parking lot to allow other motorists to get off the road.

They wanted out because they couldn't see where they were driving in the torrent. Can't blame 'em


  

A Hail of a Stupid Kid

Today's installment of "He's Too Stupid To Be Alive" takes us to the lovely town of Woodward, Oklahoma.

They make their storms big in Oklahoma, and a video surfaced of the town being pelted by baseball sized hail earlier this week.

The remarkable thing about the video: The stupid kid walking nonchalantly down the street, as if it were a pleasant spring afternoon.

Baseball sized hail hitting a normal person wcould kill him or her. Three people were injured by hail in Woodward, including a 20 day year old infant hit in the face when a softball sized hailstone crashed through the car she was in. (The little girl had minor injuries, she'll be fine)

But these people were either accidentally caught in their cars by the storm or hit by flying glass inside buildings.

However, the guy in the video is just out for a stroll, since baseball sized hail is perfect weather for a leisurely jaunt outdoors. Adding to the joy, there were apparently a couple of tornadoes swirling near the town at the time the hail was falling.

This guy is so dense he seems to be unscathed. Even the deer in the video was panicking in the hail, but our guy kept trudging, unaware of the bombardment around him.

Watch for yourself and marvel:

Security Camera Tornado Footage

Over the weekend, some dramatic footage of one of those awful tornadoes early this month in the Midwest came out.

We're used to videos of dramatic tornadoes rampaging through towns and across the countryside, but in recent years, we've gotten inside views of the fascinating chaos inside these storms thanks to the proliferation of security cameras.

A tornado begins to dismantle a Kentucky neighborhood
in this still from  a home security camera.

Seen from the outside, the giant funnel clouds are graceful, in their violent way as they tear through. The security footage shows just how terrifying they are, because these "eyes" can stay put through the tornado, unlike humans would.

In the past few years, we've borne awestruck witness to: (Click on the hyperlinks to view the videos:  a tornado laying waste to the inside and outside of a bank in Parkersburg, Iowa, 2008; a view from that same bank's ATM surveillance camera of a house blowing apart; cars being tossed by an Alabama tornado,  and inside a middle school last year in Joplin, Missouri, among others.

I wonder if these videos help people understand the dynamics of tornadoes, and how to build structures to resist them better, or are they just weather porn, the term I use to describe exciting storm videos that give you a bit of an adrenaline rush.

In any event, they're fascinating. The home security videos of the tornado in West Liberty, Kentucky earlier this month are really telling. The tornado, or at least the edges of it, didn't have that dense funnel cloud that obscures visibility. The sun appears to be even shining into the chaos, giving us a clear view of a neighborhood, the house and surrounding woods disintegrating in the chaos. Fascinating, but sad. Watch:

Waves of Joggers, Bicyclists Assaulted by Waves

I'm whining about this weekend's dismal weather here in Vermont. It's cold, with almost continuous rain. Not great for outdoor work, or leaf peeping. But it's always worse somewhere.

Take the video in this post, for instance. The other day, it was very windy in Chicago. Despite that, people went out for runs or bicycle trips along a path near Lake Shore Drive. But the wind, and high-ish water had other plans for these people. Luckily, nobody got hurt, though a puppy was washed into the lake and needed a daring rescue. (Puppy's fine, though)

Below is a video of said waves taking out runners and bicyclists.  So if you're having a bad day, rest assured somebody else had a worse day recently: