Good evening again. I just posted a blog entry (the first in over two months!) for a time lapse video of severe weather that passed through the Central Jersey area last week. I happened to be up during it, and even took some snapshots of lightning flashes with the web cam that were included in the video. As I mentioned in the post, this particular storm system went on to pass through Northeastern New Jersey and the five boroughs of New York City, and produce torrential rains that tied up traffic, wreaked havoc to the subway system there, and caused an EF2 Tornado in Brooklyn.

While it is true that tornadoes are a rare event in my part of the world including New Jersey and New York City, they do occur. Most of the time, the twisters are EF0, EF1, or EF2 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale. Back in the summer 2002, there was a tornado that struck near Rutgers University. Before that, a twister was spawned in East Brunswick by the remnants of Hurricane Fran in September, 1996. Rarely, there can also be an EF3 Tornado as was the case in November, 1989 when one such storm struck in Belle Mead about a week or so before Thanksgiving. I recalled two of those three episodes since I was at the Cook College campus of Rutgers University in the summer of 2002, and was heading to my car at Middlesex County College on that night in November 1989 when the severe weather that produced the Belle Mead Tornado struck.

While I wasn’t out in the middle of the storm at Cook College, I do recall watching some of it from inside during a break. It was quite chaotic although I didn’t spot a funnel cloud. On the other hand, I was out in the middle of the severe weather on that November night nearly twenty years ago. Being much lighter then, I was literally carried to my car by straight line winds that may have been as high as 80 miles per hour. There wasn’t really much thunder or lightning, but there was plenty of wind. This storm system actually followed another that struck the area a month earlier. The earlier round of storms had produced tornadoes in Huntsville, Alabama and other parts of the Southeast a day earlier, and later produced a tornado in Newburgh, New York. There have been also some memorable severe weather events in my hometown that weren’t tornadoes. They included a strong round of storms back in June, 1993 that knocked down trees and power lines just north of my neighborhood, a line of severe thunderstorms that rolled through on Labor Day 1998, and one that hit the northern border of my town and neighboring Plainfield in May, 2000.

The tornado that hit Brooklyn was only the second ever in the New York City borough. According to National Weather Service records, the last one to strike there was back in 1989. Since records have been taken, only six twisters have affected the five boroughs in New York City including one that hit Staten Island back in October, 2003. However, the previous tornadoes have only been either EF0 or EF1 while this latest storm was an EF2. Of the seven storms, none affected Manhattan while three impacted Staten Island, two were in Brooklyn, and there was one each in Queens and the Bronx. It has been quite a year weatherwise in the New York Metropolitan area. Prior to this latest outbreak of storms, there was perhaps the most scorching weather in the area. The combination of heat and humidity pushed the heat index at or above 100 degrees. Dew point readings were well into the 70s, which is downright atrocious.

On top of that, there has been plenty of stormy weather starting with the St. Patrick’s Day storm and continuing with the April Nor’easter. There have also been other severe weather events such as the one on May 16th, and the remnants of Tropical Storm Barry back on the weekend of June 3rd. One has to wonder, could this be a sign that global warming is beginning to produce changes in our day to day weather.