The Bomb Cyclone Out West Wasn't Supposed to Happen—and It Happened Fast
The guy on the Weather Channel, who was standing in the middle of what looked like Little America, but was only a little piece of America in North Dakota, called what he was experiencing "an arctic hurricane," which, until those clever Chinese hoaxsters and grant-sucking climate scientists got a hold of things, was a contradiction in terms. The other name for this massive and destructive weather system was far more movie-of-the-week.
They called it the "bomb cyclone."
From the Denver Post:
Gov. Jared Polis declared an emergency after the storm stranded motorists, forced massive highway and road closures across the state, halted air travel at Denver International Airport, cut power to more than 200,000 homes and businesses, disrupted public transportation services and sent trees falling across the metro area...In Denver, where police reported 125 crashes on city streets throughout the day, a separate emergency declaration by Mayor Michael Hancock will last for up to seven days...Northeastern Colorado still faced a blizzard warning through noon Thursday, and the weather service warned against travel on the roads Wednesday night. East of Denver, Interstate 70 was to remain closed to the Kansas border overnight, while, south of the city, state officials planned to keep Interstate 25 closed overnight between Lone Tree and Colorado Springs.
This is not the kind of thing that's supposed to happen, but a lot of things are happening that weren't supposed to happen, so we all better get used to it.
Colorado experienced a bombogenesis event - colloquially called a bomb cyclone - of the sort that’s more common on the East Coast. If the barometric pressure drops rapidly enough in a 24-hour period, it turns a winter storm into a cyclone with intense winds, according to Weather Nation meteorologist Chris Bianchi, who was among those sounding the alarm ahead of Wednesday’s storm. “It’s obviously a very rare circumstance for this to happen in Colorado,” said Bianchi, also a Denver Post contributor. The early conditions were equivalent to a Category 1 hurricane, the National Weather Service said. In some places - especially to the northeast and east of Denver and near the Palmer Divide - it quickly got even worse as snow fell at the rate of nearly 2 inches per hour in some places.
And it happened fast. It went from a normal winter event to a hurricane-level monster in less than a day. From the Washington Post:
An explosively intensifying winter storm centered over the Colorado Front Range continues to unleash a potpourri of extreme weather across the Plains states and Upper Midwest. The hurricane-force system has combined the worst weather of all four seasons into one - from a string of violent, tornadic thunderstorms to damaging winds, severe blizzard conditions and even flooding.It’s a storm for the record books, strengthening from a run-of-the-mill weather disturbance into a historic cyclone in 24 hours. Its central pressure dropped 33 millibars from Tuesday to Wednesday, meeting the criteria of a meteorological “bomb.” The storm made this transformation over land, rather than water, which is rare.
It moved on through the Dakotas and it spent Thursday pummeling the upper midwest. Rain precedes the blizzard in this system so, between rainfall and melting snow, there was flooding all over the Dakotas and worse was expected in the lakes and rivers of Minnesota and Wisconsin. But this storm covered parts of 25 states. In Dallas, gusts of over 100 mph brought down trees and there were tornado warnings all over the northern part of the state.
This, from the same weather system that was preparing to bury Duluth. Those Chinese hoaxsters are working overtime these days.
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