Tag: storm

Ah, what a mess

The snow has begun, and we have already gotten a few inches, slowly and steadily, over the past 12 hours or so. I already shoveled the steps once this afternoon and already you can’t tell I ever did it.     Even early this morning when I got up to make breakfast before Kelly had to go to work, we already had enough snow to coat everything outside.

And now they are saying we may get even more than they originally thought.  I will get some pictures tomorrow once it has more or less finished.

In the meantime, I am doing some Portuguese home cooking.  Maybe I will do some pictures of that too.

-Geoff

Tacloban, Samar Island, and two very different storms

After more than a week, many survivors of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines are still struggling to get basics like food, water and shelter.  And places like Samar, Leyte, and Tacloban are now getting mentioned in the news all over the world.  Samar and Leyte seem to have been hit the worst from the typhoon.

I know these place names.  Not because I have ever been there (I haven’t), but because of their famous place in history – specifically, in the fall of 1944, when the Allied invasion of the Japanese-occupied Philippines led to what was the largest naval battle in all of World War Two, and possibly the largest in recorded human history.

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Terrible news from the Philippines

Now that Typhoon Haiyan has passed over the Philippines and headed west towards Vietnam, the people there have had a chance to begin initial assessments of the damage done, and it doesn’t look good.  One observer has described the scene as “apocalyptic”.  Some areas are so devastated that there is no communication from them at all.   Accurate assessments of casualties at this point are impossible, but it looks as if the loss of life will easily be in the hundreds, if not the thousands.

If you have any ability to help at all, here’s some groups that are assisting with relief efforts: the Philippine Red Cross; the World Food Program; Shelter Box; and Americares.

-Geoff

Possibly the strongest typhoon ever recorded

Wow.  Glad we don’t have a storm like this anywhere near us.

Super Typhoon Haiyan is definitely the strongest storm of 2013, and it may just be one of the strongest ones ever recorded, with sustained winds of 195 miles per hour and gusts of up to 230 mph.  Imagine that.  Good God, an EF5 tornado has winds of 200 plus miles an hour.  And this is a tropical cyclone, causing damage over a much wider area.   They probably won’t even know for a while just everything that it has done.  The size and power of it are just mind-boggling.  Hopefully the loss of life in the Philippines and other places in its path will be minimal.  They seem to have been quite prepared, at least.

I will settle for some cooler weather and rain here, thank you very much.

-Geoff

A New Storm Naming System Proposal

I am a bit of a weather geek, and a history geek, and sometimes a weather history geek.  But you knew that already.

So anyway, I heard about this interesting proposal to change the naming system for hurricanes, and I certainly appreciate the sentiment.

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More adventures in plumbing… wheeeee…

All of the heavy rain we have experienced in the Greater Boston area recently seems to have reproduced the problem that Kelly and I had last October.

Yeah, that problem.

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Nemo photos

And, no, Nemo in this case isn’t a cute little clownfish.  Nemo was a giant record setting Blizzard/Hurricane that just dropped 2-3 feet of snow on us and flooded out parts of the New England coastline.  Whee?

On to the pictures.

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Why backups are important…

and I am not just talking about backing up your data.  I am talking about having backup plans for emergencies.  And now that some time has passed I can talk about Hurricane Sandy and some of the terrible things that went wrong in New York and New Jersey.

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About that whole “chicken little” thing

New England weather is notoriously unpredictable.  Even with the vast improvements in technology and knowledge, no forecaster is going to be able to predict the weather with absolute certainty, especially far in advance.  But when virtually all the meteorologists I read start sounding really concerned about a weather event, it might be time to start paying attention rather than poo-pooing it.

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Closed due to… snow?

As you probably have heard by now, most of the eastern seaboard is dealing with a little storm.  There are a lot of closures and various emergencies being declared including right here in MA.  Tonight I was at a party after work for a retiring colleague when my boss, at the request of another coworker, pulled up the MFA website on her phone to see if they were closed tomorrow.  This is what she saw.

Continue reading “Closed due to… snow?”