Storms
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Health

Six people die as blizzards hit northern Japan


Agence France-Presse
Sun, 03 Mar 2013 09:17 UTC
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© AFP PhotoSnow-covered rooftops across a neighborhood in Tokyo on February 6, 2013. At least six people died in a spate of snow-related incidents as blizzards swept across the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido over the weekend, police and news reports said Sunday.
At least six people died in a spate of snow-related incidents as blizzards swept across the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido over the weekend, police and news reports said Sunday.

A 40-year-old woman and her three teenaged children were found dead late Saturday in a car buried under snow in the town of Nakashibetsu, eastern Hokkaido, a local police spokesman said.

They are believed to have died of carbon monoxide poisoning as the car's exhaust pipe and was blocked by snow and the windows were up, Kyodo News said, adding that snowfalls of more than two metres (6.6 feet) were recorded in the area.
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Igloo

Heavy snowfall knocks out power to thousands in Quebec


CBC Canada
Thu, 28 Feb 2013 11:48 UTC
Heavy Snowfall
© CBCMontreal was blanketed with about 16 centimetres of snow yesterday, and Environment Canada is forecasting about 4 more centimetres will fall by end of day Thursday.
As Quebec residents wake up to a snowy morning commute, thousands are without power across the province.

Wednesday's heavy, wet snow fell on power lines and tree branches, knocking out power to more than 30,000 homes and businesses in Quebec. The Montérégie region was hit the hardest by power outages, where about 20,000 clients are in the dark.

Hydro Québec said it's not clear how long it will take for power to be restored.

Montreal was blanketed with about 16 centimetres of snow yesterday, and Environment Canada is forecasting about 4 more centimetres will fall by end of day Thursday.

Quebec City could see up to 12 centimetres of snow today and overnight.
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Snowflake

Record snowfall buries parts of Japan under 5 metres of snow


The Guardian
Fri, 01 Mar 2013 10:35 UTC
Parts of Japan have been covered in more than five metres of snow this week. But the world record is still more than double that

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© The Asahi ShimbunSnow to the depth of 5.15 metres is recorded in Aomori, Japan on February 21st.
This is proving a freakish year for weather, but Japan is having an odder time of it than most. The country has had a record winter for snow, and northern Japan is currently coated by unprecedented volumes of the white stuff - more than five metres at higher altitudes, with houses turned into igloos and roads into snow tunnels.

In the Hakkoda mountains the depth of snow has been measured at 5.61 metres - a record for Japan. Even lower down, in the city of Aomori, snow is standing at almost 1.5 metres and bulldozers are having to work round the clock.

Comment: From the BBC:



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Snowflake Cold

Global Warming? 'Truly a historic blizzard,' weather service says

Brad Lendon and Steve Almasy
CNN
Tue, 26 Feb 2013 00:00 UTC

Phillip Prince has been sitting in his tractor-trailer, stuck on Interstate 40 near Groom, Texas, for hours.

Nine hours and four minutes, to be precise.

Prince and his co-driver were due in California at 1 p.m. Tuesday, where they were going to drop off 25,000 pounds of frozen pizza.

But then they came upon what the National Weather Service is calling "a crippling, historic blizzard."

"It was pretty nasty when we first got into it," he said. "But then it turned into a whiteout."

Prince, who has been a long-haul driver for nine years, says he's never seen it this bad, as he explained his situation on CNN.com's iReport. The line of trucks is five to six miles long.

It's frustrating, the west-bound driver said, because he can see snowplows in the east-bound lanes. He hopes to get moving soon; he's down to eating his last box of Lucky Charms.

The good news is that it has stopped snowing. The winds are still 55 mph, but the skies are clear though the roads are not.

The storm has been moving east during the day, dumping records amount of snow along the way.

In Woodward, a town in northwest Oklahoma, firefighters were unable to reach a burning house because they ran into 4-foot snow drifts. The snowplow sent to dig them out also became stuck, Matt Lehenbauer, the director of Woodward, said Monday afternoon.
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Cloud Lightning

'Gigantic jet' lightning spotted over China

Elizabeth Howell
OurAmazingPlanet
Tue, 26 Feb 2013 09:05 UTC
Sprite
© Steven CummerA gigantic jet captured above a storm in North Carolina in 2009.
A rare glimpse of a "gigantic jet" - a huge and mysterious burst of lightning that connects a thunderstorm with the upper atmosphere - was made over China in 2010 and was recently described by scientists.

The gigantic jet took place in eastern China on Aug. 12, 2010 - the farthest a ground-based one has ever been observed from the equator, according to the research team.

Previous jets were mainly seen in tropical or subtropical regions, but this one took place around 35 degrees latitude, about the same as the southern part of Tennessee in the United States.

"This is the first report from mainland China," lead researcher Jing Yang, an atmospheric scientist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, told OurAmazingPlanet. The results were recently published in the Chinese Science Bulletin.

Researchers got a good look at the storm using a variety of tools, including Doppler radar data and weather pictures in the infrared band of radiation.
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Ice Cube

Hailstorm causes widespread damage in Mar del Plata, Argentina


Discovery News
Tue, 26 Feb 2013 03:58 UTC
Hailstorm in Argentina
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Snowflake Cold

2 killed as blizzard blasts southern Plains, U.S.

Doyle Rice
USA Today
Mon, 25 Feb 2013 06:53 UTC
Blizzard warnings issued in New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas.
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Emergency personnel help a stranded motorist on the I-40 service road Feb. 25 in Amarillo, Texas.
A ferocious blizzard blasted the southern Plains with heavy snow and high winds Monday, burying much of the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles under more than a foot of snow, wreaking travel havoc on the roads and in the air.

Overnight Monday and through the day Tuesday, the storm will slowly slog to the north and east, bringing a swath of snow across Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan, the National Weather Service reported.

"This storm will have a huge impact, with additional heavy snows likely over portions of eastern Kansas and northern Missouri which received very heavy snowfall amounts last week," weather service meteorologist Robert Oravec wrote in an online bulletin.

The storm is being blamed for two deaths on Monday. In northwest Kansas, a 21-year-old man's SUV hit an icy patch on Interstate 70 and overturned. And in the northwest town of Woodward, Okla., heavy snow caused a roof to collapse, killing one inside the home.

Among the big cities that will see accumulating snow Tuesday are Kansas City, Chicago, Milwaukee and Detroit, according to AccuWeather. The heaviest snow is forecast Tuesday around Kansas City, which should easily see a foot of snow. Chicago should receive about 3-6 inches of snow.

The storm will continue to dump snow across the Lower Great Lakes region Tuesday night and into northern New York State and northern New England on Wednesday, Oravec says.
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Snowflake

2nd blizzard in less than two weeks hits the U.S. Plains states - 'worse than the last one'


Yahoo! News
Mon, 25 Feb 2013 08:36 UTC
Blizzard conditions slammed parts of the central Plains Monday, forcing the closure of highways in the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles and sending public works crews scrambling for salt and sand anew just days after a massive storm blanketed the region with snow.
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National Weather Service officials in Kansas and Oklahoma issued blizzard warnings and watches through late Monday as the storm packing snow and high winds tracked eastward across West Texas toward Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri. Forecasters also warned of possible tornadoes further southeast.

Snow covered Amarillo, Texas, where forecasters said up to 18 inches could fall, accompanied by wind gusts up to 65 mph. Paul Braun, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Transport, said whiteout conditions and drifting snow had made all roads in the Texas Panhandle impassable. Interstate 40 was closed from Amarillo to the Oklahoma state line.

"It's just a good day to stay home," Braun said.

"This is one of the worst ones we've had for a while," he said. "And we kind of know snow up here."
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Cloud Precipitation

Heavy rains and flooding isolate thousands in New South Wales, Australia


World News Australia
Fri, 22 Feb 2013 17:10 UTC
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© AAPFlooding isolates about 4000 people on the New South Wales north coast.
About 4,000 are isolated on the New South Wales' north coast as the region is hit with damaging winds, strong rains and flooding.

A severe weather warning is in place for northern NSW, with the Bureau of Meteorology warning of very heavy rains leading to flash flooding over the Northern Rivers, Mid North Coast, Northern Tablelands and Hunter forecast districts.

Late on Friday night, the NSW State Emergency Service said the extreme weather had isolated about 3500 people on the north coast.

An SES spokesman said the SES had received 1000 calls for assistance so far, and had completed nine flood rescues, including one in which three people were dragged from a car at Taree.

He expected the threat of flooding to increase on Saturday.
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Cloud Precipitation

Landslides and flooding, from torrential rains, kill 17 in Indonesia


The Extinction Protocol
Sat, 23 Feb 2013 13:33 UTC
Four children were among 17 people killed over the weekend in central Indonesia after heavy rains triggered floods and landslides, officials said on Monday.The children, aged between two and nine, died along with 13 adults when flooding and landslides hit the northern part of Sulawesi island early Sunday, provincial disaster management agency spokesman Howke Makawarung told AFP. "We recorded 17 people killed. All bodies were found on Sunday," he said, adding that heavy rains had hit three areas, including the North Sulawesi provincial capital of Manado which saw water levels up to four meters (13 feet). Water, which inundated around 5,000 houses in Manado, had receded by Monday and residents had begun cleaning up their homes.


A landslide which hit the city killed a six-year old boy. "He was taking a bath in the morning when a landslide suddenly struck his house," the capital deputy mayor Harley Mangindaan told AFP. Indonesia is regularly affected by deadly floods and landslides during its wet season, which lasts for around six months. Environmentalists blame logging and a failure to reforest denuded land for exacerbating flooding. Heavy rains caused flooding in the capital Jakarta in January that left 32 people dead and at its peak forced nearly 46,000 to flee their homes. - Raw Story
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