It was shortly after noon on August 24th in the year 79 A.D. and Mount Vesuvius sent a tall cloud of steam and ash high up into the atmosphere. The ancient Roman town of Pompeii near modern day Naples was soon covered in complete darkness and the thickness of the falling debris increased by about 6 to 8 inches per hour. The rocks which comprised the debris were up to 3 inches in diameter and fell with a speed of up to 100 miles/hour. This first phase of the eruption led to casualties primarily caused by roof collapses. After 12 hours of continuous explosive activity, the second phase of the eruption began and it was characterized by substantial flow of lava down the sloping Mount Vesuvius and this caused additional deaths and destruction. In fact, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius spewed 1.5 million tons of lava per second into Pompeii and surrounding towns. In a short period of time, two thousand people were killed, the small towns of Herculaneum, Oplonti and Stabiae were destroyed, and Pompeii was changed forever.
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It was just about four years ago when America went crazy for the first coast-to-coast total solar eclipse on US soil since 1918 and it provided a great opportunity for scientists. This Saturday marks the four-year anniversary of what was referred to as “The Great American Solar Eclipse” when, on August 21st, 2017, the moon passed between the sun and earth. The result was a 67-mile wide shadow that crossed the country all the way from Oregon-to-South Carolina. Total solar eclipses occur somewhere on Earth every year or so, but generally cast their shadows over oceans or remote land masses. If you missed the 2017 total solar eclipse or it turned out to be cloudy in your particular area then there will be another opportunity in the not-too-distant future during April 2024.
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One of the most widespread and destructive heat waves ever recorded in the US took place in the summer of 1936 which fell right in the middle of arguably the hottest and driest decade ever for the nation. The decade of the 1930’s is renowned for the “Great Depression” and the “Dust Bowl”, both of which caused calamitous human suffering in this country. Not only were huge numbers of crops destroyed by the heat and lack of moisture in the “Dust Bowl” era, but thousands of lives were lost as a result of the heat, drought and economic hardship. This extreme heat wave was particularly deadly in high population areas where air conditioning was still in the early stages of development. The heat wave experienced in 1936 began in late June, reached a peak in July, and didn’t really come to an end until September. Many of the all-time high temperature records that were set in the 1930’s in numerous cities and states still stand today. Perhaps the hottest day ever recorded in the US took place on July 14th in 1936 when the average maximum temperature was 96°F and 70% of the US was over 90 degrees.
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Death Valley, California will have high temperatures near the 125 degree mark over the next few days, but this is still short of the all-time record there that occurred 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 eight 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-four years ago yesterday, Hurricane Audrey slammed into the southwest coast of Louisiana and became the earliest major hurricane (category 3) to make landfall in the US. Hurricane Audrey killed hundreds of people – estimated to be somewhere between 400 and 500 - including many of whom to this day remain unidentified and tragically, about one-third of those were children. The high number of deaths - in an era without satellite imagery - were attributed to the storm moving ashore earlier and stronger than predicted while most people were sleeping.
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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 Sunday, June 6th, marks the 77th 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 this same time of year and during the height of the Cold War when 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. On May 23rd, 1967, 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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The most intense geomagnetic storm of the 20th Century took place one hundred years ago during solar cycle 15 in a 3-day period from May 13-15 in 1921. The storm occurred before the widespread electrical dependence of infrastructure that we have in today’s world, but the impact from an extraordinarily powerful coronal mass ejection was still quite extensive. 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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