Bomb cyclones batter United States east coast

Hyderabad: ‘Bomb cyclone’ hit eastern United States recently triggering transport chaos, outages. The US Eastern Seaboard is one of the regions where bombogenesis is most common. That’s because storms in the midlatitudes—a temperate zone north of the tropics that includes the entire continental United States—draw their energy from large temperature contrasts. Along the United States […]

Hyderabad: ‘Bomb cyclone’ hit eastern United States recently triggering transport chaos, outages. The US Eastern Seaboard is one of the regions where bombogenesis is most common.

That’s because storms in the midlatitudes—a temperate zone north of the tropics that includes the entire continental United States—draw their energy from large temperature contrasts.

Along the United States East Coast during winter, there’s a naturally potent thermal contrast between the cool land and the warm Gulf Stream current.

What is a Bomb Cyclone?
A bomb cyclone is a large, intense midlatitude storm that has low pressure at its center, weather fronts and an array of associated weather, from blizzards to severe thunderstorms to heavy precipitation. Bomb cyclones put forecasters on high alert, because they can produce significant harmful impacts.

Reasons
This can happen when a cold air mass collides with a warm air mass, such as air over warm ocean waters. The formation of this rapidly strengthening weather system is a process called bombogenesis.

It occurs when a midlatitude cyclone rapidly intensifies, dropping at least 24 millibars over 24 hours. A millibar measures atmospheric pressure.

How is Bomb Cyclone different from a Hurricane?
Hurricanes tend to form in tropical areas and are powered by warm seas. For this reason, they’re most common in summer or early fall, when seawater is warmest.

Bomb cyclones generally occur during colder months because cyclones occur due to cold and warm air meeting. During the summer, there’s generally not much cold air across the atmosphere; this means a bomb cyclone is much less likely to occur.

Hurricanes form in tropical waters, while bomb cyclones form over the northwestern Atlantic, northwestern Pacific and sometimes the Mediterranean Sea.

Are bomb cyclones dangerous?
It depends. Sometimes, bomb cyclones behave like conventional winter storms. But sometimes they produce heavy flooding, blizzard conditions and wind speeds comparable to a Category 1 hurricane.

Bombogenesis is said to occur when a storm’s central barometric pressure drops at least 24 millibars in 24 hours. In the 1940s, some meteorologists began informally calling some big coastal storms “bombs.” Many big storms that wallop the East Coast – are the product of bomb cyclones.

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