1969 was a remarkable year and will be long remembered as the year when man first walked on the moon, the Miracle Mets shocked the sports world, and the Woodstock Festival took place in upstate New York. It will also be remembered as the year when a major hurricane – Hurricane Camille – struck the United States as a category 5 storm and the second most intense tropical cyclone on record (only the 1935 Labor Day hurricane had a lower central pressure at landfall). Hurricane Camille made landfall in Mississippi and wreaked havoc from the Gulf States to as far north as the Mid-Atlantic region with widespread flooding, record rainfall, and it cost the lives of several hundreds of people along its path of destruction.
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The high temperature in Death Valley, California this Sunday, July 16th, could reach an amazing 130°F, but that would still be short of the all-time record which occurred there way back in 1913. On July 10th, 1913, the weather observer at Greenland Ranch in Death Valley recorded a high temperature of 134°F. One hundred and ten years later, this is still the highest air temperature ever reliably recorded on Earth. In addition to this all-time and worldwide high temperature record, the year of 1913 produced numerous other extreme weather events.
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Nowadays, when the people of New Orleans think of devastating hurricanes they think of Katrina, but before 2005, the most notorious storm name in Louisiana was Audrey. Sixty-six years ago this week, Hurricane Audrey slammed into the southwest coast of Louisiana and became the earliest major hurricane (category 3) to make landfall in the US. The last June hurricane to make landfall in the US was Bonnie in 1986 and there have been only four since 1950 and all of those happened on the Gulf coast. Perhaps the most active hurricane season on record in the US is 1886 and there were three category 2 hurricanes in June that particular year.
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The official Atlantic Basin tropical season was barely underway in June of 1972 when a polar front interacted with an upper-level trough of low pressure over the Yucatan Peninsula. Within a few days, a tropical depression formed and the system moved slowly eastward and emerged in the western Caribbean Sea by the middle of the month. The depression began to intensify over the warm waters of the Caribbean Sea and soon became Tropical Storm Agnes – the first named storm of the 1972 tropical season. Ultimately, Agnes would reach hurricane status, grow to a diameter of about 1000 miles, and become the costliest hurricane at the time to hit the US and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was the prime focus of its wrath.
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With thousands of lives on the line, there is no doubt that the weather forecast made for the D-Day invasion in Normandy, France during World War II was the most important of all-time and one of the most difficult as well given the lack of sophisticated forecasting tools that we enjoy in today’s world. The first satellite image was still nearly sixteen years away (TIROS on April 1, 1960) and reliable computer forecast models were still decades away. This Tuesday, June 6th, marks the 79th anniversary of the D-Day invasion and the weather forecast for that historic event makes for quite an interesting story in what turned out to be a pivotal moment in world history. Years of detailed planning went into the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944, but success hinged on one element that no military commander could control — the weather. Defying his colleagues, Captain James Martin Stagg advised General Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower to postpone the invasion of Normandy by one day from June 5th to June 6th because of uncertain weather conditions in a weather forecast that changed the course of World War II and altered world history.
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It was during the height of the Cold War and a powerful solar storm could have led to a disastrous military conflict between the US and Soviet Union if not for the early efforts of the US Air Force to monitor solar activity. It was this same time of year on May 23rd, 1967 when a solar storm took place that was so powerful, it jammed radar and radio communications in polar regions and the US Air Force actually began to prepare aircraft for war thinking the nation’s surveillance radars were being jammed by the Soviet Union. Fortunately, space weather forecasters in the military suspected there might be another cause and they relayed information about the possibility that a solar storm could have been the reason for the disrupted radar and radio communications. As it turned out, this information was enough to keep the planes on the ground and the US avoided a potential nuclear weapon exchange with the Soviet Union.
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Solar cycle 25 is well underway and is expected to reach its maximum phase sometime in the latter part of 2024 or early 2025. In recent days, solar cycle 25 has been quite active with numerous sunspots and coronal mass ejections aimed right at the Earth’s upper atmosphere. It was this same time of year in 1921 that the most intense geomagnetic storm of the 20th Century took place during solar cycle 15. That storm 102 years ago occurred in a 3-day period from May 13-15 and it was before there was widespread electrical dependence of infrastructure that we have in today’s world. The impact, however, was still quite extensive from an extraordinarily powerful coronal mass ejection. The storm’s electrical current sparked a number of fires around the world including one near the Grand Central Terminal in New York City. In addition, auroras appeared throughout the eastern US creating brightly lit nighttime skies and telegraph service virtually stopped in its tracks due to blown fuses and damaged equipment. Research in recent years has suggested that this super solar storm of May 1921 was equally as intense as the granddaddy of all super storms in recorded history – the “Carrington Event of 1859”.
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Weather played an important role in the 1912 disaster of the sinking of the Titanic and it likely played a direct role in another disaster that took place 25 years later – at least that is the prevailing belief. On May 6th, 1937, while the German passenger airship LZ 129 Hindenburg was attempting to land at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey, a flame appeared on the outer cover of the rear of the ship. Within 34 seconds, the entire airship was consumed by fire and the golden age of airship travel was over.
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There is one stadium in Major League Baseball (MLB) with a permanent roof and seven stadiums now feature retractable roofs. Retractable roof usage is weather-dependent and some of the findings from the past full season are surprising. In addition to precipitation, the decision as to whether to close a retractable roof may depend on local temperature, wind or humidity levels.
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This Saturday marks the 111th anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic (April 15, 1912) and I thought I’d revisit the overall weather pattern that played a key role in the tragedy. By studying weather maps and written records from that time period, some definitive conclusions can be drawn about the weather during the trip across the Atlantic, and there are also some interesting relatively new theories involving atmospheric conditions and their possible effects.
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