39 replies
1h56m
If any west-coasters are confused as to how this is news: the Northeast is sort of geologically unusual for the US in that we have almost no surprising, sudden weather thingies.
No tornados, mild thunderstorm, occasional hurricanes (but they are usually weakened a bit compared to, like, Florida by the time they get up here and they’ve spent a long time going up the coast so they tend to be well tracked by forecasters), some flooding but not much, and no earthquakes. Our bad weather events are usually blizzards, which you can see coming and which take a while to accumulate.
We’re right in the middle of the North American plate and the area is covered in gentle old hills and mountains.
So, we’re all just not used to the planet surprising us!
What is a Nor'easter?
Literally: a cold hurricane.
Some people misuse the term to mean "a blizzard affecting New England and/or the Northeast", but it actually specifically refers to a storm that's been pushed inland by sea winds coming from the northeast, off the Atlantic Ocean. That specific pattern results in a particularly cold and brutal storm.
Nor'easters are technically cyclones, just like hurricanes, and the two are very similar in many regards. The difference is that a Nor'easter forms further north, in cold water, and it is actually strengthened by cold air, whereas hurricanes form further south and are diminished in strength as they cool off.
https://scijinks.gov/noreaster/
Weather nerds will get very confused by ‘a cold hurricane’ since hurricanes are tropical cyclones and tropical cyclones have a warm core by definition.
…but they’ll be fine with a ‘a big cold cyclone’ I guess ;)
Well, it's literally true: a hurricane is a tropical cyclone, and a nor'easter is an extratropical cyclone. A nor'easter is literally the "cold" counterpart of a hurricane!
So like, the Nor'easter is a cryo-cyclone and the regular hurricanes are pyro-cyclones!
It’s just a hurricane in the winter, no biggie. We would enjoy the snow and check out the surf (from a safe distance). I think you aren’t officially supposed to suggest the latter though.
I mean, it really isn't a huge deal, but the nor'easter that just came across us here in southern maine left about 350k people without power in a state of 1.6 million people.
That's not nothing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_1992_nor%27easter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nor'easter
A lot of cold water and maybe snow.
its a lot of warm moisture that comes up the coast from the southeast and slams into cold air from canada and can drop a lot of snow/wind. It can cause bad storms in the ocean and high seas.
I am very confused with you classifying earthquakes under "weather thingies"
The thought process was: I know earthquakes aren’t really weather, so I’ll tack on “thingies” to make it clear that I’m making up some new more generalized term.
The point was to group all the… I dunno, whatever, surprising attacks by the planet into one thing. I can’t think of a real term for this, I think there might not be one, I guess I could call it something like “weather or geological surprises” but that’s just dull.
Sim City "Disaster" menu items
A taxonomy my monkey brain can actually understand.
Natural disasters
Acts of God as the insurance industry calls them!
Natural disaster thingies
We can have natural disasters they just have to schedule beforehand.
It just illustrates how people in the NE think about natural disasters. Basically any big natural event is weather-related.
When the 2011 Virginia quake happened, I was somewhere in the Boston area sitting in my parked car, and at first I thought it was a strong wind rocking my car side-to-side. It took a few seconds for me to realize the shaking wasn't a "weather thing"
What!?! We have some doozies here in the summer. (Finger Lakes region of NY.)
We had some allright thunderstorms in MA, but I lived briefly in the Midwest and—they have these thunderstorms that are still scary even when you are inside. It is bizarre.
Agreed! Grew up in Illinois. Live in CT now. Miss those summer thunderstorms in the midwest.
i live in dallas, about 10 years ago there was a small tornado skipping up and down about 3 miles north of me (they typically move SW to NE). I got in the car to "chase" it and made it to the end of my street. It was so ominous looking I turned around and went back home.
I grew up in New England, but have lived in California for 30 years. A 4.7 is waaay larger than anything I've personally felt here!
Plus the Northeast is just not made for quakes. The 200 year old house I grew up in would probably have creaked pretty alarmingly.
House I'm renovating here in the northeast had the concrete in the basement poured yesterday... Going to head over there to see if any weirdness occurred
Good way of removing any trapped air!
we've had tornadoes in NJ..
The East Coast gets microtornadoes that deshingle roofs or tip trees over.
The Midwest gets MS Paint eraser tool tornadoes.
We get about one a decade in upstate NY.
You think the west coast has tornados and hurricanes? West coast by the pacific ocean has even milder weather than the east.
I think you’re drawing the wrong conclusion from the post. There was no suggestion of tornadoes on the West Coast. It was a discussion of relatively isolated meteorological phenomena in the northeast corridor.
Eh, there are plenty of areas of the northeast that are affected much differently by these events than where you are. For example, Vermont has had multiple catastrophic floods in memory, including last summer and Hurricane Irene. Mountainous and coastal areas magnify these systems, the lowlands and developed megalopolis region may be truer to your claims.
We're also on a shelf of hard rock, so a quake in NJ is felt by all of New England. Keys on the wall were shaking here 100mi away.
Yeah, our reaction to this here is reminding me of what happens when Oregon or Atlanta gets an inch of snow. An earthquake (that is felt) is just not something that we experience often.
I remember when Atlanta got 2" and people were literally abandoning their cars on highways [1], whereas in the northeast people are out driving in blizzards.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/01/30/268720258...
NYC seems to have been taken quite by surprise by a storm last September.
I think the term you may be seeking is 'seismic event'
I cannot speak for California, but in PNW there is even less “surprising, sudden weather thingies.”
Rain is not pouring, unlike on east coast (speaking from my expeirences in both NYC and Atlanta), it is just drizzling at a very low rate. It doesnt thunderstorm. I’ve heard thunder iirc only 2-3 times in my 7 years living there. No tornados or tsunamis. No massive blizzards out of nowhere. I felt this earthquake in NYC today myself, and I remember having a similarly strong eathquake in Seattle only a couple of times.
I have no idea where this “west coast and its sudden weather thingies” take comes from (again, I cannot speak for California), but it runs counter to everything I’ve personally experienced.
Also, earthquakes on the east coast travel further, and are more likely to damage structures than earthquakes of the same magnitude on the west coast[0]. That's due to underlying geological differences.
The magnitude is one immediately-available measure of the strength of an earthquake, but it's not the only measurement that's relevant to determining the size or impact of an earthquake. Depth, duration, location - there are many other measurable (and also immeasurable) factors which parameterize a seismic event.
[0] https://www.usgs.gov/news/featured-story/east-vs-west-coast-...