They called it a “bomb cyclone”—a name hardly intended to bring peace of mind to those experiencing the worst of it. In essence, it was a remarkable surge of bitter arctic air that tore through much of the Great Lakes and East Coast. Improbable images from the South proved to the rest of the country that even great swaths of Dixie wound up momentarily sheathed in ice.
If you think of El Paso’s weather as being one of our most livable attributes, you probably have in mind a lovely spring day or golden autumn afternoon. El Paso residents can be forgiven for overlooking any summertime heat waves or teeth-chattering January storms—but at least our seasons behave somewhat as expected.
El Paso’s weather may not be one hundred percent predictable, but we usually don’t have to worry about some entirely new weather phenomenon. Yet for 58 million Americans on the right-hand side of the nation, this past weekend brought exactly that—something new in what winter may bring: suddenly there are weather bombs. Since nearly 75% of the American population had already experienced temperatures below freezing by the end of Christmas week, it’s a good bet that we’ll be talking about this stretch of weather for a long, long time.
Throughout the weekend, the TV weather personnel did their best to explain the “bomb cyclone:” it has to do with “bombogenesis”—an incredibly rapid drop in atmospheric pressure. This one came about when Arctic air masses decided to take a vacation down here in the States. Especially if you caught CNN’s video of frozen iguanas falling out of Florida trees, you had to agree with Wired.com that this storm “isn’t your typical bombogenerator.”
The unusual intensity seemed to make many of the weather forecasters inside their studios excited and, frankly, happy. The ones doing live on-camera updates from outdoors, less so. But I’d have to say that the cake in unsettling prose was definitely taken by CNN.com’s writers with their headline, “Winter storm threatens East Coast, bringing temps colder than Mars.”
Happily, average El Paso temperatures are dependably more moderate than those on the other planets—and that’s only one of the attributes that make people want to move here. If your own 2018 is likely to involve El Paso real estate endeavors, I hope you’ll give me a call!
Published on 2018-01-08 11:00:46
