Weird Weather Occurances

A few weeks ago I went on a tour for a grad school. During our actual tour of the grounds, I stared as some repair men were fixing a set of windows. The windows were blown in...out...apart, however you want to describe it. This was on a part of the building that had several windows, but the other windows within a 30 foot radius were fine. Such a select piece of destruction seemed odd to me. I wondered, amused, "Did one of the students break under pressure and build a MacGyver-style bomb and let loose the frustration?"

Nope. Our tour guide noticed my attention and said the school had recently suffered a microburst. A What? So I asked for more of an explanation which amounted to the person fumbling and coming up with this: a reverse tornado. Hmm, probably not. I did find a great explanation of microbursts on the Department of Atmospheric Sciences of the University of Illinois.

Essentially, a microburst is a strong rush of wind towards the ground. If the "body" of the wind is less than 2.5 miles in diameter then it's a microburst and probably will cause damages to whatever is nearby. The highest wind speeds occur during the initial decent towards the ground, but then once contact with the ground has been made the wind fluidly bounces back to curl around the original column of wind and pockets of extreme winds are created. This explains how the windows on the grad school tour got shattered, and in such a freak manner.

The web page about mircobursts created by the U of Illinois has some good diagrams and actual photos of the occurrence, check it out here.

Happy fall weather everyone!

How's the weather?

One more quick thing. While recently wondering how a friend is doing, who is currently in Ranger school down in hot Georgia, I thought the heat there could be nothing compared to Afghanistan or other Middle Eastern countries. So what is the weather typically like?

Weather Underground tells me that at the moment, Islam-Qala is looking at a high of 82 F and a low of about 59 F. Baghdad has a temperature range of highs in the 100s F and a lows around 75 F. UV levels are at an eight and 9 respectively, which is alright if you're used to it I guess. The UV level where I live is currently one (out of sixteen). Both of those cities are way too hot for me.