Published April 29, 2006

Associated Press

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Storms battered North Texas with wind up to 100 mph and hail the size of baseballs, damaging buildings and slamming parked airplanes into each other at an airport.

“When you have winds from 80 to 100 mph it can do damage similar to that of a tornado,” said Jesse Moore, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. “That can do some very, very big damage.”

No major injuries were reported in the storms late Friday, said Police Chief Carl Dunlap.

However, trees were blown over and vehicles and buildings were damaged throughout the city, Dunlap said. A couple of mobile homes were severely damaged, he said.

Hangars were damaged at the Gainesville Municipal Airport and parked airplanes were shoved into each other by the high wind, said Airport Director Matt Quick.

At least 15 planes were damaged at the airport where about 70 aircraft are based, Quick said Saturday morning. Damage was still being assessed, he said.

In addition to the storms north of the Dallas-Fort Worth area late Friday, violent weather also struck near Waco and east of the Dallas-Fort Worth area in the Canton area, Moore said.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,193689,00.html#ixzz1uUzJFpZe

Overturned cars left streets unnavigable and flattened trucks clogged highway shoulders. Preliminary estimates were that six to 12 twisters had touched down in North Texas, senior National Weather Service meteorologist Eric Martello said. But firm numbers would only come after survey teams checked damage Wednesday, he said.

In suburban Dallas, Lancaster police officer Paul Beck said 10 people were injured, two of them severely. Three people were injured in Arlington, including two residents of a nursing home who were taken to a hospital with minor injuries after swirling winds clipped the building, city assistant fire chief Jim Self said.

“Of course the windows were flying out, and my sister is paralyzed, so I had to get someone to help me get her in a wheelchair to get her out of the room,” said Joy Johnston, who was visiting her 79-year-old sister at the Green Oaks Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. “It was terribly loud.”

Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport canceled hundreds of flights and diverted others heading its way. Among the most stunning video was an industrial section of Dallas, where rows of empty tractor-trailers crumpled like soda cans littered a parking lot.

“The officers were watching the tornadoes form and drop,” Kennedale police Chief Tommy Williams said. “It was pretty active for a while.”

The confirmed tornadoes touched down near Royce City and Silver Springs, said National Weather Service meteorologist Matt Bishop.

April is the peak of the tornado season that runs from March until June. Bishop said Tuesday’s storms suggest that “we’re on pace to be above normal.”

Johnston said her sister was taken to the hospital because of her delicate health. Another resident at the nursing home, Louella Curtis, 92, said workers roused her out of bed and put her in the hall.

“The hallways were all jammed,” Johnston said. “Everyone was trying to help each other to make a path for others. I’d say everybody was out of their rooms within 20 minutes.”

Most of Dallas was spared the full wrath of the storm. Yet in Lancaster, television helicopters panned over exposed homes without roofs and flattened buildings. Broken sheets of plywood blanketed lawns and covered rooftops.

A pastor at one Lancaster church saw debris swirling in the wind, then herded more than 30 children, some as young as newborns, into a windowless room to ride out the storm. Nearby at the church’s school, about 60 more children hid in another windowless room near the women’s bathroom.

An entire wall of Cedar Valley Christian Academy wound up being taken out in the storm. Pastor Glenn Young said he didn’t know when the school might re-open.

“I’m a little concerned,” Young said. “This is our livelihood.”

Residents could be seen walking down the street with firefighters and peering into homes, looking at the damage after the storm passed.

Devlin Norwood said he was at his Lancaster home when he heard the storm sirens. He said he made a quick trip to a nearby store when he saw the funnel-shaped tornado lower, kick up debris and head toward his neighborhood.

“I didn’t see any damage until I got back home. We had trees destroyed, fences down, boards down, boards penetrating the roof and the house, shingles damaged,” said Norwood, 50, an accountant and graduate student.

The storm pushed cars into fences and toppled trees. Branches and limbs scattered across lawns and residential streets, and in one driveway, a tow-behind RV was left torn apart and crumpled.

“Obviously we’re going to have a lot of assessments to make when this is done,” Dallas County spokeswoman Maria Arita said.

American Airlines canceled more than 450 arriving and departing flights at its hub airport by late Tuesday afternoon, and 37 other incoming flights had been diverted to different airports.

DFW Airport spokesman David Magana said more than 110 planes were damaged by hail. It wasn’t clear how many belonged to American Airlines, but American and American Eagle had pulled 101 planes out of service for hail-damage inspections.

Flights also were canceled at Dallas Love Field, which is a big base for Southwest Airlines. That airline canceled more than 45 flights in and out of the airport by Tuesday evening.

Meteorologists said the storms were the result of a slow-moving storm system centered over northern New Mexico.

____

Associated Press writers Terry Wallace and David Koenig in Dallas, Schuyler Dixon in Arlington, Texas, Betsy Blaney in Lubbock, Angela K. Brown in Fort Worth and Paul J. Weber in San Antonio contributed to this report.

In Lancaster, Texas, south of Dallas, roofs were stripped to bare plywood and houses were speared by flying two-by-fours. About 300 buildings were damaged, according to the city’s mayor. A citywide curfew was put in place, and a shelter was opened.

“It was like ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ ” said Gwen Dabbs, who wasn’t able to make it to an interior room before the storm blew her windows out. She huddled in a corner of her living room covered with blankets as the tornado passed.

“My body is sore from being in the corner. But I don’t have not a cut, not a scratch, and I’m so thankful. Thank you, Lord,” she said.

Videos of area damage, show tractor-trailers being lifted and flipped like matchsticks. Ominous clouds filled the skies, making it as dark as night.

“The pictures that you’re seeing and that I’m seeing are just horrific. We’ve got reports of a number of injuries, but no reports of fatalities at the present time,” said Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst.

As many as 13 tornadoes might have touched down in north Texas on Tuesday, said Jesse Moore, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Dallas-Fort Worth.

“Somewhere between six and 13. I know that sounds like a big range, but until we actually go out and do the survey, the number is just approximate,” he said. Teams are preparing to asses the damage on Wednesday.

National Weather Service tests graphic warnings

The severe weather affected flights and aircraft at area airports.

More than 110 aircraft at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport sustained various degrees of hail damage, the airport said. It reported airlines canceled 400 departures,and more than three dozen incoming flights were diverted to other airports because of the storm.

Southwest Airlines, meanwhile, canceled more than 40 flights at Dallas Love Field, while American Airlines canceled all flights through Tuesday evening at Dallas-Fort Worth, one of the world’s busiest airports.

The announcement, made via Twitter, was likely to affect American flights in other parts of the country. In all, American and its American Eagle partner airline canceled 234 outbound flights, according to a statement from American.

By Tuesday evening, more than 47,000 homes and businesses in north Texas were without power, said a spokeswoman for Oncor Electric Delivery.

Jonathan Cook said he was in a bank in south Fort Worth when the storm rolled in and he decided to leave. He went to a nearby gas station, where he ran into a friend whose window had been blown out and a National Weather Service worker with a radio who told them tornadoes were touching down nearby.

“A girl said ‘Look up.’ And there were two funnel clouds that touched down about an eighth of a mile up from us, and debris was flying and we were trying to decide where to go.

“About that time, she said, ‘Look behind us’ — and a third tornado formed behind us, but hadn’t touched down,” Cook said. “And about three minutes after that, the sirens started sounding.”

Among the most dramatic images of the day were from a freight truck depot on the south side of Dallas, where one twister flung semitrailers high in the air and hundreds of feet from their parking spots.

The lot is owned by Wisconsin-based Schneider National Trucking Company. Company spokeswoman Janet Bonkowski said there were no injuries at the facility and no damage to the building, “but significant damage to the equipment that was in our yard.”

A tractor weighs 20,000 pounds. An empty trailer weighs 14,000 pounds, while a full one weighs about 46,000, the company said.

Weather expert Sean Morris estimated the tornadoes that moved through the Dallas-Forth Worth area were EF1 or EF2 twisters, at their strongest.

“This is fairly weak in terms of tornadoes, but we saw the awesome power of the twisters as they lifted the trailers several hundred feet in the air,” he said.

Damage was also reported in Kennedale and Arlington, Texas. The mayor of the latter city signed a disaster declaration to help cope with the destruction.

“It’s extensive damage,” said Tiara Richard, a spokeswoman for Arlington police. No major injuries have been reported so far, but affected areas were still being searched for people who may be trapped, she said.

Tarrant County spokesman Mark Flake said about 40 homes in Arlington sustained moderate damage. The Cowboys football stadium emerged almost unscathed, according to its general manager.

Watch videos of the twisters

In Kennedale, a large water main broke, and several people were injured, said city spokeswoman Amethyst Cirmo, though she could not immediately confirm how many. The city’s police chief, however, said there were no reports of deaths or injuries thus far. A community center was opened to residents displaced by the storm.

Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez said the area was hit by “a series of tornadoes” that inflicted heavy damage on some of the southern suburbs.

“Our officers are going to several locations right now,” Valdez said. She said deputies were en route to some of the hardest hit areas to prevent looting, amid reports “that some of that has already started.”

“We have our hands full. There are already a lot of situations where we have to go out and help,” she said.

But all told, damage from the storm could have been much worse, said Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings.

“The big headline is that we dodged a big bullet,” he said. “We’re saddened by the damage the system did, but we’ve got nobody that’s dead and no significant injures. It really is a miracle.”

If you need any recovery assistance, call our 24 Hour Emergency response team, on 800-588-5135 or contact response@storm24.com. Storm 24′s team of highly trained and experienced professionals handle every aspect of the complex disaster recovery process. Our teams work together to restore your property and achieve the best possible result.

Leap Day blizzard will hit portions of the Dakotas and Minnesota hard with heavy snow, severe drifting snow and very low visibility to close out February 2012.

Feb. 29 happens only once every four years, so blizzards on this date are much more rare than any other day in the winter. Wednesday is Leap Day 2012.

Cities in the path of the storm include Fargo, Jamestown and Bismarck in North Dakota, Pierre, Huron and Aberdeen in South Dakota and Duluth, International Falls and Bemidji in Minnesota. The worst of the storm for much of this area will be tonight into Wednesday morning.

The storm has already spread heavy snow from the mountains of Arizona into Colorado.

As the storm rolls northeastward across the Plains, intermittent snow will break out well ahead of the main storm over the Dakotas and portions of Minnesota today. Little or no accumulation may result initially in most areas due to the light nature of the snow and the snow hitting during the day.

However, things will change as the storm causes precipitation to ramp up and road surfaces cool tonight.

The snow will become heavier and winds will increase over the eastern part of the Dakotas and central Minnesota late today and tonight. The heavy rate of snow, combined with increasing blowing and drifting of snow on the ground will cause travel conditions to deteriorate rapidly.

Heavy snow and some wind will also reach into northern Wisconsin and central and northern Michigan tonight into Wednesday.

The storm will also have a warm side to it as many often do with a zone of rain and thunderstorms. Severe weather is possible from portions of the central and southern Plains to the Ohio Valley.

In between, a brief period of wintry mix ranging from sleet, freezing rain and wet snow will occur right along the storm center track at the onset, followed by a change to rain from Sioux Falls, S.D., to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. In much of this area, the potential for a glaze of ice or a coating of slush will occur first thing today. In the Detroit area, this potential exists tonight.

A difference in temperature of a few degrees around the start of the precipitation near the ground and several thousand feet up will determine whether or not some of these areas have a brief, or extended, period of wintry mix.

As the blizzard diminishes over the northern Plains and the Upper Midwest, later Wednesday the next stop for the storm will be the Northeast.

A severe storm that hit San Antonio in the wee hours Saturday dumped heavy rain throughout the city, with more than 4 inches and a scattering of hail reported in some places.

A flash flood watch was lifted by about 8 a.m. Saturday.

Over about eight hours after midnight Friday, 4.24 inches of rain was recorded just south of Interstate 35 and Loop 410, according to the National Weather Service.

The San Antonio International Airport received about 1.4 inches.

The rain was blamed for multiple crashes, and emergency responders rescued several motorists from high water late Friday and early Saturday.

Power outages from downed power lines affected 14,000 CPS Energy customers at the peak of the storm.

Service was restored to most by late Saturday morning, though crews were delayed by road closures, said Albert Cantu, a spokesman for the utility.

By noon, about 300 CPS Energy customers remained without power, most on the North Side.

A fire at a home on the far North Side may have been sparked by lightning, Fire Department spokesman Deborah Foster said. It caused $88,000 in damage to a house on the 20000 block of Messina about 1 a.m., and left one firefighter briefly hospitalized as a precaution because of elevated vital signs, she said.

Rain started coming down around 9 p.m. Friday at a rate of 2 inches per hour, and by 10 p.m. intensified into a severe storm with large hail and high winds, National Weather Service forecaster Pat McDonald said.

Streets on the West and Northwest sides and toward the center of the city saw temporary closures.

The Texas Department of Transportation reported Saturday morning that Interstate 35 was shut down between Somerset and Cassin roads and between Splashtown Drive and Loop 410 South. The flooding also shut down U.S. 90 between Callaghan Road and Old Highway 90.

WASHINGTON — Nature is pummeling the United States this year with extremes.

Unprecedented triple-digit heat and devastating drought. Deadly tornadoes leveling towns. Massive rivers overflowing. A billion-dollar blizzard. And now, unusual hurricane-caused flooding in Vermont.

If what’s falling from the sky isn’t enough, the ground shook in places that normally seem stable: Colorado and the entire East Coast. On Friday, a strong quake triggered brief tsunami warnings in Alaska. Arizona and New Mexico have broken records for wildfires.

Total weather losses top $35 billion, and that’s not counting Hurricane Irene, according to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. There have been more than 700 U.S. disaster and weather deaths, most from the tornado outbreaks this spring.

Last year, the world seemed to go wild with natural disasters in the deadliest year in a generation. But 2010 was bad globally, and the United States mostly was spared.

This year, while there have been devastating events elsewhere, such as the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Australia’s flooding and a drought in Africa, it’s our turn to get smacked. Repeatedly.

“I’m hoping for a break. I’m tired of working this hard. This is ridiculous,” said Jeff Masters, a meteorologist who runs Weather Underground, a meteorology service that tracks strange and extreme weather. “I’m not used to seeing all these extremes all at once in one year.”

The U.S. has had a record 10 weather catastrophes costing more than a billion dollars: five separate tornado outbreaks, two different major river floods in the Upper Midwest and the Mississippi River, drought in the Southwest and a blizzard that crippled the Midwest and Northeast, and Irene.

What’s happening, say experts, is mostly random chance or bad luck. But there is something more to it, many of them say. Man-made global warming is increasing the odds of getting a bad roll of the dice.

Sometimes the luck seemed downright freakish.

The East Coast got a double-whammy in one week with a magnitude 5.8 earthquake followed by a drenching from Irene. If one place felt more besieged than others, it was tiny Mineral, Va., the epicenter of the quake, where Louisa County Fire Lt. Floyd Richard stared at the darkening sky before Irene and said, “What did WE do to Mother Nature to come through here like this.”

There are still four months to go, including September, the busiest month of the hurricane season. The Gulf Coast expected a soaking this weekend from Tropical Storm Lee and forecasters were watching Hurricane Katia slogging west in the Atlantic.

The insurance company Munich Re calculated that in the first six months of the year there have been 98 natural disasters in the United States, about double the average of the 1990s.

Even before Irene, the Federal Emergency Management Agency was on pace to obliterate the record for declared disasters issued by state, reflecting both the geographic breadth and frequency of America’s problem-plagued year.

“If you weren’t in a drought, you were drowning is what it came down to,” Masters said.

Add to that, oppressive and unrelenting heat. Tens of thousands of daily weather records have been broken or tied and nearly 1,000 all-time records set, with most of them heat or rain related:

_ Oklahoma set a record for hottest month ever in any state with July.

_ Washington D.C. set all-time heat records at the National Arboretum on July 23 with 105 and then broke it a week later with 106.

_ Houston had a record string of 24 days in August with the thermometer over 100 degrees.

_ Newark, N.J., set a record with 108 degrees, topping the old mark by 3 degrees.

Tornadoes this year hit medium-sized cities such as Joplin, Mo., and Tuscaloosa, Ala. The outbreaks affected 21 states, including unusual deadly twisters in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Massachusetts.

“I think this year has really been extraordinary in terms of natural catastrophes,” said Andreas Schrast, head of catastrophic perils for Swiss Re, another big insurer.

One of the most noticeable and troubling weather extremes was the record-high nighttime temperatures, said Tom Karl, director of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center. That shows that the country wasn’t cooling off at all at night, which both the human body and crops need.

“These events are abnormal,” Karl said. “But it’s part of an ongoing trend we’ve seen since 1980.”

Individual weather disasters so far can’t be directly attributed to global warming, but it is a factor in the magnitude and the string of many of the extremes, Karl and other climate scientists say.

While the hurricanes and tornado outbreaks don’t seem to have any clear climate change connection, the heat wave and drought do, said NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt.

This year, there’s been a Pacific Ocean climate phenomenon that changes weather patterns worldwide known as La Nina, the flip side to El Nino. La Ninas normally trigger certain extremes such as flooding in Australia and drought in Texas. But global warming has taken those events and amplified them from bad to record levels, said climate scientist Jerry Meehl at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Judith Curry of Georgia Tech disagreed, saying that while humans are changing the climate, these extremes have happened before, pointing to the 1950s.

“Sometimes it seems as if we have weather amnesia,” she said.

Another factor is that people are building bigger homes and living in more vulnerable places such as coastal regions, said Swiss Re’s Schrast. Worldwide insured losses from disasters in the first three months this year are more than any entire year on record except for 2005, when Hurricane Katrina struck, Schrast said.

Another factor is that people are building bigger homes and living in more vulnerable places such as coastal regions, said Swiss Re’s Schrast. Worldwide insured losses from disasters in the first three months this year are more than any entire year on record except for 2005, when Hurricane Katrina struck, Schrast said.

Unlike last year, when many of the disasters were in poor countries such as Haiti and Pakistan, this year’s catastrophes have struck richer areas, including Australia, Japan and the United States.

The problem is so big that insurers, emergency managers, public officials and academics from around the world are gathering Wednesday in Washington for a special three-day National Academy of Sciences summit to figure out how to better understand and manage extreme events.

The idea is that these events keep happening, and with global warming they should occur more often, so society has to learn to adapt, said former astronaut Kathryn Sullivan, NOAA’s deputy chief.

Sullivan, a scientist, said launching into space gave her a unique perspective on Earth’s “extraordinary scale and power and both extraordinary elegance and finesse.”

“We are part of it. We do affect it,” Sullivan said. “But it surely affects us on a daily basis – sometimes with very powerful punches.”

Last year was my kind of December, the coldest on record for the state of Georgia. On the opposite end was this past Thanksgiving Day, which was near 70 degrees…bleh!

If you live in the East and recall last December, persistent cold should be one memory you have. Here are a few of the statistics:

• Philadelphia, Miami: Only 3 days with above-average warmth the entire month.
• New York City: Only 4 days with above-average warmth.
• Coldest December on record in Georgia and Florida.
• A top ten coldest December for NC, SC, AL, MS, TN, KY, IN, OH, WV and VA
• Syracuse, NY: A December record 72.7 inches of snow.

Coming off a mild November, December 2011 is so far showing signs that it might not pack the winter-chilled punch of a year ago in the East.

So what’s the difference? It’s all about Greenland. That’s right, the large island with a population of just under 58,000 people in the north Atlantic Ocean can have a controlling influence on weather in the eastern states. More specifically, it’s what’s going on in the atmosphere above them.

Greenland Block: No Repeat of Last Year

A common way to “lock cold air” in the East for an extended period of time is when the jet stream takes a sharp northward turn near Greenland (see image above). This so-called “Greenland block” pattern, well….blocks cold air from draining west to east off Canada. Instead the cold is forced to nosedive deep into the South and East. This was a common occurrence in December 2010. In the meteorological world I live in, we refer to this as the negative phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO).

For the most part, what we’ve experienced since August is the positive phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation. This prevents any blasts of cold air from “locking in” for a lengthy period of time across the East.

Perhaps at the end of the month we can all compare our heating bills for December 2010 versus December 2011. If you find out your bill was considerably cheaper, you can impress your friends (or show your geekiness) by telling them it’s thanks to the absense of a Greenland block!

There is the potential for a disruptive and damaging wind event, including a Santa Ana, during the second half of the week in the Southwest.

While upcoming winds will get rid of San Joaquin Valley fog, it is looking more and more like a strong wind event will rock California and other parts of the Southwest beginning Wednesday in the north and Thursday/Friday in the south.

While we will continue to update you on the severity of the winds, it does appear that gusts of 50 to 60 mph are possible where people live in California and elsewhere in the Southwest. Much stronger winds (80 to 100 mph) are possible over the ridges and through the passes.

According to Western Weather Expert Ken Clark, “It is possible we have a one in 5- to 10-year event in terms of wind velocities and impact.”

Crosswinds could flip high-profile vehicles and cause areas of poor visibility from blowing dust. The winds may be strong enough to cause sporadic power outages, downed trees and property damage. Flight delays are possible at airports in the region due to episodes of strong crosswinds and/or blowing dust.

Chilly Winds This Time

The Santa Ana and its geographical cousins often produce substantial warmth in coastal and lowland areas as the air warms tremendously while being compressed as it blows downhill from the mountains.