This Date in Weather History

Sundowners — the equivalent of Southern California’s Santa Ana winds — blow over the ridgetops and through the passes of the Santa Ynez Mountains to flow downslope onto the coastal plains around Santa Barbara. These winds also occur in the Middle East where they are known as a “simoon” and is a strong, superheated and dust-laden wind its name derives from the Arabic verb ‘to poison,’ presumably because exposure to such temperatures could cause heat stroke. The bane of firefighters, they heat the air by compression as they push it downward against the land below, squeezing out its moisture and helping wildfires ignite and spread. Earning their name because they frequently appear in late afternoon and early evening, mild Sundowner winds can result in slight increases in temperature. But a few times a year, stronger Sundowners can bring sharp spikes in temperature, extremely low relative humidity and gale-force winds that force-feed wildfires. Half a dozen times a century, Super sundowners blast superheated air across the coastal plains at higher than gale-force speeds. Perhaps the most powerful Sundowner, was reported June 17, 1859, by the Coastal Pilot Newspaper of California. According to the report, the morning air temperature of 75 to 80 degrees rose steadily until about 1 p.m., when a series of superheated waves of wind blasted the Santa Barbara area. By 2 p.m., the air temperature reached 133 degrees and hovered there for three hours, killing small animals, destroying fruit, ruining gardens and heavily damaging trees before eventually falling to 122 around 5 p.m. People reportedly took refuge behind the 3-foot-thick walls of the Daniel Hill adobe, the casa grande at Dos Pueblos Ranch, and the adobe winery at San Jose Vineyard among other places. Rabbits, cattle, snakes, and deer died on their feet according to a government report, and fruit fell from trees to the ground, scorched on the windward side. Birds fell dead from the sky and others flew into wells in search of cooler air and drowned. The 133-degree temperature held the North American continental record for heat for decades until 1913 when Death Valley recorded a temperature of 134 degrees. 133 currently stands as the 3rd hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth.

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National Geographic reports that “Animal rain” is a real weather phenomenon that happens when small animals get swept up in waterspouts or updrafts, and then fall to Earth with raindrops. Reported rains of bats, fish, snakes, birds, frogs, and jellies stretch back for centuries. The phenomena most associated with animal rain are waterspouts, although many meteorologists are skeptical that waterspouts can actually cause animal rain. Waterspouts form as violent storm clouds swirl above a large body of water. These clouds form a tornado-like whirlwind that dips into the ocean, lake, or pond. Waterspouts can spin up to 100 miles per hour, and may pull up small objects in their funnel—water, pebbles, and small aquatic animals. A waterspout is not a swirling column of water—the water in a waterspout is the result of condensation, not liquid "sucked up" from a body of water. Strong updrafts may also pull animals into their swirling vortices. Updrafts can sweep up much larger animals than waterspouts—traveling birds and bats, as well as frogs, snakes, and insects. As waterspouts and updrafts move over land, they lose their swirling energy. The storm clouds that formed the waterspouts are forced to dump their heavy loads. The heaviest objects are dumped first, and the lightest objects usually simple raindrops are dumped last. This explains why reports of animal rain usually describe only one type of animal raining down. A cloud will dump all objects of a similar weight at the same time—fish heavy, followed by insects lighter, followed by rain. On June 16 1939 in Towbridge, England, such a rain occurred with reports that hundreds of tiny frogs fell before a heavy shower.

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McKinney, ND is a collection of hard scrabble farms just a few miles south of the Canadian border on the dusty high plains of North Dakota. Hard to find on any map, it’s barely an intersection where two farm highways meet. The vast flat land bakes in the summertime with temperatures often exceeding 100 and in the winter the mercury routinely dips below zero. Rainfall averages less than 20” a year. But on June 15, 1879 7.07” of rain fell establishing a record, incredibly on the same date of June 15 in 1897 almost 8” of rain fell establishing yet another record.

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According to the Oregon Encyclopedia the spring of 1903 was among the warmest and driest in memory for eastern Oregon. Sunday, June 14, was another hot day as the residents of Heppner, Oregon prepared for family suppers. By mid-afternoon, dark clouds were building in the hills southwest of town. At 4:30 pm, rain, and then hail, began to fall. The storm produced such a noise people could not hear the roar of the wall of water and debris that descended on the town. The Heppner Gazette reported: "Without a second's warning, a leaping, foaming wall of water, 40 feet in height, struck Heppner at about 5 o'clock Sunday afternoon, sweeping everything before it and leaving only death and destruction in its wake." The silt-laden floodwaters carried away everything in their path. The thick mass acted more like a battering ram than a flood of liquid. Homes floated off foundations and crashed into other structures, breaking apart and adding their debris to the flowing mass. By the time the flood waters receded, most of Heppner's residential area was destroyed and two-thirds of its homes were gone. The town's business district was wrecked with all but three of the town's businesses demolished. Newspaper reports gave disparate figures for the loss of life from the disaster. Early reports placed the death count as high as 500 persons. Eventually, 247 bodies were recovered. Many surviving residents left Heppner following the disaster. The 1910 census showed a population of 880, down from the 1,400 living there in 1903. It was not until the 1990 that Heppner's population rebounded to pre-flood levels.

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Temperature extremes are not unusual in the state of California. After all the highest reliably recorded temperature in the world, 134 was recorded in Death Valley on July 10, 1913. Temperatures of 130 or higher have been recorded as recently as 2005. The lowest temperature recorded in California was at Boca, in Nevada County, when a reading of -45° F was observed on January 20, 1937. That’s a difference of 179 degrees – but it’s not the great difference of any state, it only ranks 3rd, the record belongs to Montana, with a state record high of 117 and a record low of 70 below zero. But on June 13, 1907 in Tamarack, California the mercury plunged to 2 degrees above zero making it the coldest temperature ever observed in the U

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On June 12, 2014 a hail storm that hit Abilene produced more than $400 million in insured losses to vehicles, homes and commercial property. "This is the worst storm damage I've seen in my 41 years in the insurance business," Leroy Perkins of the Perkins Insurance Agency in Abilene, told the largest state insurance trade association in the United States. the storm, packing baseball-sized hail, moved directly south across Abilene pounding the city's north side and downtown area. Commercial buildings downtown received millions of dollars in damage to roofs, windows and structures. Total uninsured losses are also expected to be high, Perkins adds. "Downtown looks like autumn because all of the trees have been stripped of their leaves and many limbs down in the street," Karla Martin with the Taylor County Sheriff's Office said the day after the storm. Hundreds of vehicles, many of them new cars, were declared totaled from the beating they took. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) notes that hail causes approximately 1$ billion in damage to crops and property each year.

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June 11, 2008 marks the tragic loss of 4 teenagers at a Boy Scout camp near Little Sioux, Iowa; 48 more were injured. The tragedy struck at the 1,800-acre camp about an hour north of downtown Omaha. An EF3 tornado, with 145 mph winds, descended on the remote camp, striking and leveling a cabin where campers had sought shelter as warnings of the storm circulated through the camp. A chimney at the cabin collapsed, sending heavy concrete blocks onto the Scouts. This was the worst of the storms that hit the Northern Plains that day. There were also two farms damaged from two different tornadoes, one near Spencer, Iowa and the other near Springfield, Minnesota. A nursing home was also damaged by a tornado in southern Salina, Kansas. There were over 300 reports of severe weather across the nation with 64 of those reports from tornado activity. There had been no basement or in-ground shelter at the camp when the tornado hit. The following year, the Boy Scouts Mid-America Council launched a major fundraising campaign to build emergency shelters at all of its camps. By 2013, two tornado shelters had been built at the camp, and a siren was added. The new structures have concrete walls, steel shutters and doors and emergency power backup, and were built to withstand an EF5 tornado.'

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Benjamin Franklin, inventor of bifocal glasses, the Franklin stove, one of those that wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, ambassador, Governor of Pennsylvania, on June 10 1752 in Philadelphia, flew a kite during a thunderstorm and collected an ambient electrical charge in a Leyden jar, enabling him to demonstrate the connection between lightning and electricity. According to the Franklin Institute, Franklin had been waiting for an opportunity like this. He wanted to demonstrate the electrical nature of lightning, and to do so, he needed a thunderstorm. He had his materials at the ready: a simple kite made with a large silk handkerchief, a hemp string, and a silk string. He also had a house key, a Leyden jar (a device that could store an electrical charge for later use), and a sharp length of wire. His son William assisted him. Franklin had originally planned to conduct the experiment atop a Philadelphia church spire, according to his contemporary, British scientist Joseph Priestley (who, incidentally, is credited with discovering oxygen), but he changed his plans when he realized he could achieve the same goal by using a kite. Franklin and his son “took the opportunity of the first approaching thunder storm to take a walk into a field,” Priestley wrote in his account. “To demonstrate, in the completest manner possible, the sameness of the electric fluid with the matter of lightning, Dr. Franklin, astonishing as it must have appeared, contrived actually to bring lightning from the heavens, by means of an electrical kite, which he raised when a storm of thunder was perceived to be coming on.” Despite a common misconception, Benjamin Franklin did not discover electricity during this experiment—or at all, for that matter. Electrical forces had been recognized for more than a thousand years, and scientists had worked extensively with static electricity. Franklin’s experiment demonstrated the connection between lightning and electricity. To dispel another myth, Franklin’s kite was not struck by lightning. If it had been, he probably would have been electrocuted. Franklin became interested in electricity in the mid-1740s, a time when much was still unknown on the topic, and spent almost a decade conducting electrical experiments. He coined a number of terms used today, including battery, conductor and electrician. He also invented the lightning rod, used to protect buildings and ships. By the time he died in 1790 he was arguably the most famous man in the world.

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The tornado outbreak of 9 June 1984 is among the most important tornado events in Russia’s history because it was associated with substantial loss of life with 400 deaths, and contained one of two F4 tornadoes ever recorded for in that country. Very little information is available on a violent tornado outbreak that swept through areas north of Moscow in the summer of 1984. The Soviet Union had not yet disbanded and few details were leaked to the international media. The outbreak was the result of a series of violent supercell thunderstorms that travelled north-northeast at speeds greater than 50mph. Local newspapers reported that massive hailstones, some over 2lbs in weight, fell over the affected areas. 400 people were killed, with most of the fatalities likely the result of a single tornado that tore through the town of Ivanovo. A French research article describes how the tornado threw cars long distances, lifted a 350-ton operating crane and leveled “steel-reinforced” buildings. According to the same article, the Russians unofficially awarded the tornado an F4 rating, although some of the damage was indicative of F5 strength. Reports describe how the tornado scoured pavement from a highway and hurled a 120,000lb water tank several blocks. Satellite images at the time showed an strong severe weather set up reminiscent of large outbreaks in tornado alley in the US. If the reports are all true, then the outbreak was an unprecedented event and astoundingly violent for an area generally accustomed to tornadoes only capable of inflicting F1 and F2 damage.

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The 1953 Flint–Worcester tornado outbreak was a devastating tornado outbreak sequence spanning three days, two that featured tornadoes each causing at least 90 deaths—an F5 occurring in Flint, Michigan on June 8, 1953, and an F4 in Worcester, Massachusetts the next day. The Worcester storm stayed on the ground for nearly 90 minutes, traveling 48 miles across Central Massachusetts. In total, 94 people were killed, making it the 21st deadliest tornado in the history of the US. In addition to the fatalities, over 1,000 people were injured and 4,000 buildings were damaged. The tornado caused $52 million in damage, which translates to more than $350 million in today’s dollars.

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