Weather Whys; Land Hurricane

It's pretty well known that hurricanes are born over the warm waters of the tropical oceans. A feedback process allows them to grow and develop and even helps them to move along. And while hurricanes may strike coastal communities with deadly fury, they usually weaken quickly and fall apart when they move over land. The effect is much the same as if you stopped up the fuel lines in your car. As the warm, tropical water serves as fuel for hurricanes and the storm's engines can't run for very long without it. So given that hurricanes are by their very nature creatures of the ocean, what on earth literally is a land hurricane. Well the term is used occasionally to describe exceptionally strong low pressure systems that have powerful sustained winds and unusually low pressure at their centers. For instance, in February 1962, a low pressure system packing winds of over 80 miles per hour destroyed a Soviet research station on the Arctic island of Severnia-Zemlia.

And in October 1942, an intense low pressure system brought wind gusts of over 100 miles per hour to Colorado and the Dakotas. That storm had a central pressure of 969 millibars, a full 43 millibars below standard sea level pressure. Any regular hurricane with pressure like that would be classified as a category two on a scale of one to five, certainly a respectable storm. As you might have guessed, the term land hurricane is fairly misleading. Low pressure systems that develop in higher latitudes and tropical low pressure systems form and grow in very different ways, but if either system gets strong enough, the effects could be similar. But weather wise is made possible by a grant from the National Science Foundation and is a service of the University of Oklahoma. For weather wise, I'm Drew Barlow.