Billy_Bob
Diamond Member
A "Bomb Cyclone" Is nothing more than a very organized low-pressure storm system. Much like a hurricane, these form over the land and the cold of the upper atmosphere, and two jet streams meeting and flowing together remove competing waves in the atmosphere allowing the low pressure to intensify. This low pressure will drop in barometric pressure at the core. IF a low pressure drops 1 millibar in pressure, each hour, for 24 hours, it then becomes a sustained drop in pressures and the organization of the low strengthens. The very cold air aloft is pushed to the earth's surface very rapidly, just as it does in the eye wall of a hurricane. This is the criteria for a low-pressure center to be called a "Bomb Cyclone".
The low pressure over Wyoming dropped temperatures 42 degrees F. in less than 30 minutes. This shattered the all-time one hour drop record by 5 degrees F and did it in 30 min. (the old record was 37 deg F in 37 min). We went from 38 degrees F to -29 degrees F after just 75 minutes. That is a 67 degree drop in temperature. Inside 12 hours and 30 minutes we reached the low of -42 degrees F. And these are ambient temperatures, not wind-chill temps.
In total, we dropped 81 degrees F inside 12 hours 30 minutes. The record for total drop in temperature is 100 degrees F that was recorded in Yellowstone's Ranger Station in 1933.
THE DANGER: These organized storms can freeze you to death in short order if you are not properly dressed and able to take cover. Here is the wind chill calculator for the point where we reached -29 and had sustained winds of 35 mph.
The 'feels like' temp is -67.3 deg F. The important value to know is how much energy is being stripped from exposed skin. 2,671 W/m^2. (Watts per meter ^2) This means that a person with just 1-meter square of skin exposed will lose 2,671 watts of energy. It takes just 2,500 watts loss of energy to freeze exposed skin in 60 seconds.
Storms like this, which catch people unprepared, can kill.
These storms were very frequent in the 1930's and 1960's during the cooling phases of the solar cycles. We have just begun to experience them again as we return to the cooling phase of our solar cycles. They will become more and more frequent the longer we continue to cool.
This is what these storms are capable of. When I was a child, I remember having to crawl out the kitchen window and shovel out the door of the house. Later that day my brothers and I were jumping off the roof of the house into snow drifts. I didn't know it at the time, but we had made history as one of the worst snow falls in modern history.
I lived in northeastern Montana at the time. The picture below was of North Dakota in 1966. Some regions had 27 feet of snow after that series of storms was done.
Can you imagine the chaos today if this occurred once again? We are again in the flow pattern that caused this storm. We are again having these very large and very low-pressure storms. They were called blizzards back then..
The low pressure over Wyoming dropped temperatures 42 degrees F. in less than 30 minutes. This shattered the all-time one hour drop record by 5 degrees F and did it in 30 min. (the old record was 37 deg F in 37 min). We went from 38 degrees F to -29 degrees F after just 75 minutes. That is a 67 degree drop in temperature. Inside 12 hours and 30 minutes we reached the low of -42 degrees F. And these are ambient temperatures, not wind-chill temps.
In total, we dropped 81 degrees F inside 12 hours 30 minutes. The record for total drop in temperature is 100 degrees F that was recorded in Yellowstone's Ranger Station in 1933.
THE DANGER: These organized storms can freeze you to death in short order if you are not properly dressed and able to take cover. Here is the wind chill calculator for the point where we reached -29 and had sustained winds of 35 mph.
The 'feels like' temp is -67.3 deg F. The important value to know is how much energy is being stripped from exposed skin. 2,671 W/m^2. (Watts per meter ^2) This means that a person with just 1-meter square of skin exposed will lose 2,671 watts of energy. It takes just 2,500 watts loss of energy to freeze exposed skin in 60 seconds.
Storms like this, which catch people unprepared, can kill.
These storms were very frequent in the 1930's and 1960's during the cooling phases of the solar cycles. We have just begun to experience them again as we return to the cooling phase of our solar cycles. They will become more and more frequent the longer we continue to cool.
This is what these storms are capable of. When I was a child, I remember having to crawl out the kitchen window and shovel out the door of the house. Later that day my brothers and I were jumping off the roof of the house into snow drifts. I didn't know it at the time, but we had made history as one of the worst snow falls in modern history.
I lived in northeastern Montana at the time. The picture below was of North Dakota in 1966. Some regions had 27 feet of snow after that series of storms was done.
Can you imagine the chaos today if this occurred once again? We are again in the flow pattern that caused this storm. We are again having these very large and very low-pressure storms. They were called blizzards back then..
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Maybe a more apt name might have been a Low Pressure Bomb.
