{"id":17047,"date":"2013-06-25T19:34:13","date_gmt":"2013-06-26T00:34:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/gregladen\/?p=17047"},"modified":"2013-06-25T19:34:13","modified_gmt":"2013-06-26T00:34:13","slug":"twin-cities-june-21st-mega-storm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/2013\/06\/25\/twin-cities-june-21st-mega-storm\/","title":{"rendered":"Twin Cities June 21st Mega-Storm"},"content":{"rendered":"

The video below has meteorologist Paul Douglas talking about the big storm we had in the Twin Cities a few days ago (from his excellent series of climate change and weather related videos<\/a>). The storm actually followed on a number of days with a fair amount of rain, and up here in the northern part of the Twin Cities, we had a pretty bad blow with high wind gusts and lots of rain the day before. But on the 21st, a storm swept mainly through the Western Suburbs and Minneapolis, but actually a much wider area than that. I drove down to pick up Julia near Roseville yesterday, a couple of days after the storm went through, and had to change directions four times because of roads being closed, three of those due to the storm (one had to do with a stuck semi, I think unrelated). At present over 10,000 Twin Cities people are without power, and we are having a heat wave. At least one major grocery store in the Western Suburbs (probably several but I only have direct knowledge of one) had to throw out huge quantities of food that they could not refrigerate. Many areas of the city of Minneapolis were left essentially un-navigable, due to down trees and power lines. As Paul points out in his video this was roughly like a 20+ mile wide F0 tornado passing through the area. That’s a great analogy for Twin Cities people because we have tornadoes here. As a person from the East Coast, I might also say it was roughly like a somewhat diminutive Category I hurricane going through (though the hurricane would have lasted an hour or more rather than 20 minutes or more at that intensity).<\/p>\n

Anyway, have a look at the video, which is produced by Weather Nation<\/a>‘s Paul Douglas:<\/p>\n