Weather radar shows giant ‘storm’ of dust, bugs in Texas

[Navigator]

_http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/radar-dust-bugs-texas-weather-130821240.html

Forecasters in Texas thought something was wrong with their equipment late last week when radar showed a massive area of rain and strong storms stretching from Dallas to Austin on a dry summer day.

“It looked like it was raining,” Jennifer Dunn, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Dallas-Fort Worth, told the Austin American-Statesman on Friday. “We thought something was wrong with the radar, but we checked our instruments and measurements. Everything was working fine."

A screen shot from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showed what appeared to be large swath of storms in the area. But while temperatures in Austin hit a record 106 degrees on Friday, skies were clear, Dunn said. She suspected the radar was picking up bugs—like, a lot of bugs.

But Pat McDonald, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in New Braunfels, Texas, disagreed.

“If it were just bugs, we’d be talking about the second coming of Christ,” McDonald said.

Dust, pollen, humidity, "lady bugs, grasshoppers, bees and even a few birds," he said, were likely kicked up into the atmosphere by a weak cold front and showed up on radar as a storm field.

"Not the apocalypse," McDonald said.

The mass disappeared after early Friday evening as temperatures fell.

And we probably won't see any apocalyptic air masses on the radar for a while. According to the National Weather Service, record or near-record low temperatures are expected across Central Texas through midweek.

 

[Alada]

Yeah, nothing unusual about that, massive bug storms that show up on radar - happens all the time.

The part that also that caught my eye was the rapid shift from record highs of 106 degrees to the prediction of record lows – within the space of a week!

But don’t worry: "we probably won't see any apocalyptic air masses on the radar for a while"

 

[Olesya]

Here is the newscast of the storm _http://www.wftv.com/videos/weather/weather-radar-shows-giant-storm-of-dust-bugs-in/v5hTt/ The weather forecast predicts that another one in a couple of days

 

[1984]

And here it is on SOTT from June 30: http://www.sott.net/article/263438-Texas-meteorologists-picked-up-an-apocalyptic-like-storm-on-their-radar-that-turned-out-to-be-a-huge-cloud-of-dust-bugs-pollen-and-even-birds

According to this report, it wasn't a massive bug swarm as the article implies:

Dunn and her colleagues said their best guess was that the anomaly was a giant swarm of bugs.

But a meteorologist for the weather service office in New Braunfels, which includes Austin, told the Statesman that insects likely made up less than 1 per cent of the unusual matter in the air over the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Meteorologist Pat McDonald said dust, pollen and humidity likely made up the majority of what the radar detected, though the debris mass also likely contained some lady bugs, grasshoppers, bees and a few birds.

 

[Olesya]

Thank you 1984.

 

[Navigator]

Yup, thanks for the head's up, 1984, I thought I had done proper search on SOTT.