Bomb Cyclone
"Bomb Cyclone" ??
That sounds so way-over-the-top dramatic.
What happened to the word blizzard?
After reading this, I guess I'm a little more educated:
In the 1940s and 1950s, meteorologists at the Bergen School of Meteorology began informally calling some storms that grew over the sea "bombs" because they developed with a great ferocity rarely seen over land.
By the 1970s, the terms "explosive cyclogenesis" and even "meteorological bombs" were being used by MIT professor Fred Sanders (building on work from the 1950s by Tor Bergeron), who brought the term into common usage in a 1980 article in the Monthly Weather Review. In 1980, Sanders and his colleague John Gyakum defined a "bomb" as an extratropical cyclone that deepens by at least (24 sin φ/ sin 60°)mb in 24 hours, where φ represents latitude in degrees. This is based on the definition, standardised by Bergeron, for explosive development of a cyclone at 60°N as deepening by 24mb in 24 hours. Sanders and Gyakum noted that an equivalent intensification is dependent on latitude: at the poles this would be a drop in pressure of 28 mb/24 hours, while at 25 degrees latitude it would be only 12 mb/24 hours. All these rates qualify for what Sanders and Gyakum called "1 bergeron".
(from Wikipedia)
More on what's taking place out there:
Powerful Nor'easter morphs into 'bomb cyclone'
Really really nasty, folks.
Grace & Peace & Love to you all -
Matt
