Shucking Oysters: Weathered
By Alex Allen
In the weather front, November did not disappoint. It never does really. I call November the month of storms, ferry cancellations, power outages, and losing your marbles. You can see it in people’s faces, especially after three days of no power. Resigned anger. Zen fury. And bad hair. It wasn’t just the weather affecting our well-being. Other equally frustrating events we had no control over happened. Immediately, after the power outage, City West fibre optic was down for two days and the timely postal strike dragging on with no settlement in sight.
Last week was one crazy week, with over 140,000 people without power. Outages dotted the entire BC coasts. Ferry cancellations from Haida Gwai to Swartz Bay. On Hornby, some challenged souls had no power for five days – all while having to listen to a gas generator next door. We have our sob stories. Every year. The quintessential Canadian weather story. If we can’t incessantly talk about polar vortexes, nine out of ten of us will make a point of checking weather forecasts at least once a day (when the power is on).
Not too long ago, a typical weather report was fairly innocuous. The narrative has remained the same. We still get hammered, blasted, bombarded, and clobbered by the elements. It’s not mild mannered accountants drafting the weather reports it’s frustrated army generals. Every weather event is “intense,” “severe,” “extreme,” “rapidly deepening,” “aggressive,” “hitting” and “brewing.” If it was a person you’d run the other way.
The difference is that today, we get Meteorology 101 updates along with a quote from some well-meaning qualified expert: “We’re calling it a big skinny fire hose because when you look at the satellite and the radar it’s really quite amazing how if it shifted to the north or south it would drastically change the outcome.”
And what about atmospheric rivers? Aren’t they just the same old rainstorms we’ve always had? What has changed is the frequency, size and impact of these rainstorms. Atmospheric rivers are long, narrow bands of concentrated water vapour in the sky or big skinny fire hoses, depending on your viewpoint. Most are typically 800 kilometres wide and 1,000 km long, with more than double the flow of the Amazon River.
Though the term atmospheric river was first coined by two MIT scientists in 1998, it wasn’t until the 2000s that the term went viral. As our climate has changed, the subject accelerated. In BC, research on atmospheric rivers has also accelerated. Studies suggest we will see atmospheric rivers getting even bigger and transporting even more water vapour. The impact on the BC coast will be huge.
As for bomb cyclones, that’s probably a new one for some of you who don’t study military weather terminology. The first known usage of the term, was in a 1980 research paper in which meteorologists were trying to describe the intensity of winter storms. The Weather Channel defines this condition as, having undergone “bombogenesis,” which sounds like what happens when a Brazilian Butt Lift went horribly wrong. Instead, it’s when a low-pressure system drops rapidly over a short amount of time, resulting in a “bomb-like explosion of winter weather madness,” not an explosion of gluteal fat.
“Bomb cyclone can seem dramatic and kind of intimidating terminology, it can elicit apocalyptic images, but there’s just a lack of understanding with regards to that…it’s a specific atmospheric term, a meteorological term,” Tyler Hamilton, a meteorologist with The Weather Network said soothingly.
Even simple one-word weather terms can be confusing. Showers. Rain. Drizzle. Sprinkles. What’s the real difference? It’s all about intensity and duration. Like the qualities of an ideal partner, Rain is steady, has a continuous fall of water droplets, often lasting for long periods. Showers, on the other hand, have issues with commitment, are shorter and have more sporadic bursts that come and go quickly. While Rain can be heavy and persistent, Showers are usually lighter and more scattered. It’s definitely a toss up. Focused and driven or fun and ditsy? Unfortunately, Rain is often associated with gloominess, while Showers can occur even on sunny days. No matter your persuasion, both Rain and Showers with their distinct characteristics are each unique in their own way.
What about Drizzle and Sprinkles? Like twin consorts, Drizzle and Sprinkles are often hard to tell apart. Drizzle is more of a fine mist, whereas Sprinkles is a very light Rain whose drops fall more sporadically. Luckily, both are fairly easy to distinguish from Rain and Showers. For one, their raindrops will be much smaller and won’t amount to much water collected in your cistern.
Not to encourage amphibious breaching, but I do think Showers wins the congeniality contest – even if scattered.
