The weather got stranger and stranger. The new year’s January saw:
High temperature in London for the week of Jan 10, −26 F. In Lisbon, a 60-degree drop in 7 minutes. Snow in San Diego, snow in Miami. New York Harbor froze over, trucks drove across. Reunion Island: 235 inches of rain in 10 days. In Montana, temperature dropped 100 degrees F in 24 hours, to −56 F. In South Dakota the temperature rose 60 degrees in 2 minutes. In Buffalo, New York, 30-foot snowdrifts blew in from frozen Lake Erie on 60 mph winds. Reindeer walked over fences from the zoo and went feral. On the Olympic Peninsula, a single downdraft knocked over 8 million board feet of trees.
In a North Sea storm similar to that of 1953, Holland suffered 400 dead and flooding up to 27 miles inland.
February was worse. That February saw:
A storm in New England with 112 mph winds. Waterloo, Iowa, had 16 days straight below 0 F. 7 inches snow in San Francisco. Great Lakes totally frozen over. Snow in L.A. stopped traffic. Ice in New Orleans blocked the Mississippi River. −66 F in Montana. 100 mph winds in Sydney Australia. Feb. 4, 180 tornadoes reported, 1,200 killed; named the “Enigma Outbreak.”
A low-pressure system manifested the rapid intensification called “bombogenesis” and brought 77 inches of snow in 2 hours to central Maine. Reunion Island, 73 inches rain in a day. Winds 113 mph in Utah. Rhine floods caused $60 billion damage. An Alberta hailstorm killed 36,000 ducks.
A thunderstorm complex called a derecho struck Paris with hurricane force, causing $20 billion in damage. 150 mph wind in Oslo. Two Bengal tigers escaped a Madison, Wisconsin, zoo in a tornado. Thousands of fish fell in a storm on Yarmouth, England.
165 mph winds make a category 5 storm; there had been three in U.S. history; two struck Europe that February, in Scotland and Portugal.
Soon it would be Washington, D.C.’s turn.
During 1815’s “year without summer,” after the Tambora volcano exploded, average temperatures worldwide dropped 37 degrees F.