Rain is not pouring, unlike on east coast (speaking from my expeirences in both NYC and Atlanta), it is just drizzling at a very low rate. It doesnt thunderstorm. I’ve heard thunder iirc only 2-3 times in my 7 years living there. No tornados or tsunamis. No massive blizzards out of nowhere. I felt this earthquake in NYC today myself, and I remember having a similarly strong eathquake in Seattle only a couple of times.
I have no idea where this “west coast and its sudden weather thingies” take comes from (again, I cannot speak for California), but it runs counter to everything I’ve personally experienced.
I'd put the constant wildfires in the weather thing bucket.
Oregon is full of volcanoes and about to slip off the continental shelf, right? But I guess those surprises just exists in potential form.
I've also been day hiking after work and gotten more than a few heavy rains. One of which almost gave me hypothermia because it snuck up on me while I was in the woods on top of something during one of those drizzles you're referring to.
For Washington, in the 134 tornados since 1950 there were 6 fatalities, 303 direct injuries, and $31 million in damages. However most of that was from a single bad year, 1972, which had 4 tornados and all 6 of those fatalities, along with 301 of the 303 injuries. $25 million of the damages were from that year, too.
For Oregon it was 130 tornados since 1950, with 0 fatalities and 5 injuries. $32 million in damages. Like Washington most of the damage came from one year, 1968, with $25 million in damages.
Even though they are rare it turns out that we do have a functioning tornado warning system here. I found this out a few years when my iPhone started blaring a very loud alarm--louder than anything I'd ever heard from it before.
I had never been anywhere near a hurricane in my life before I moved to NYC. I thought that was just something you worried about in the Caribbean or occasionally Florida.
What!?! We have some doozies here in the summer. (Finger Lakes region of NY.)
We have a word for that...smart.
I remember when Atlanta got 2" and people were literally abandoning their cars on highways [1], whereas in the northeast people are out driving in blizzards.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/01/30/268720258...
The magnitude is one immediately-available measure of the strength of an earthquake, but it's not the only measurement that's relevant to determining the size or impact of an earthquake. Depth, duration, location - there are many other measurable (and also immeasurable) factors which parameterize a seismic event.
[0] https://www.usgs.gov/news/featured-story/east-vs-west-coast-...
Plus the Northeast is just not made for quakes. The 200 year old house I grew up in would probably have creaked pretty alarmingly.
That's not nothing.
Literally: a cold hurricane.
Some people misuse the term to mean "a blizzard affecting New England and/or the Northeast", but it actually specifically refers to a storm that's been pushed inland by sea winds coming from the northeast, off the Atlantic Ocean. That specific pattern results in a particularly cold and brutal storm.
Nor'easters are technically cyclones, just like hurricanes, and the two are very similar in many regards. The difference is that a Nor'easter forms further north, in cold water, and it is actually strengthened by cold air, whereas hurricanes form further south and are diminished in strength as they cool off.
…but they’ll be fine with a ‘a big cold cyclone’ I guess ;)
Well, it's literally true: a hurricane is a tropical cyclone, and a nor'easter is an extratropical cyclone. A nor'easter is literally the "cold" counterpart of a hurricane!
Just another example of how one person's typical experience with storms can still be unusual when experience some place else.
Sure, my original comment was very ambiguous about what I've just posted, but that's how the tangent worked in my mind.
The Midwest gets MS Paint eraser tool tornadoes.
The point was to group all the… I dunno, whatever, surprising attacks by the planet into one thing. I can’t think of a real term for this, I think there might not be one, I guess I could call it something like “weather or geological surprises” but that’s just dull.
When the 2011 Virginia quake happened, I was somewhere in the Boston area sitting in my parked car, and at first I thought it was a strong wind rocking my car side-to-side. It took a few seconds for me to realize the shaking wasn't a "weather thing"
Generally: concerns of an extra-human, non-biological origin. E.g., JMA doesn't address pandemics.
The PNW does get tremendously powerful Pacific cyclones every so often [0]. These are huge storms that would do real damage to mid-Atlantic cities.
And there's the known risk of the "big one" -- subduction zone quake, Seattle fault, etc. Sleep tight East coast, you'll be fine.
[0] - https://www.climate.washington.edu/stormking/mainindex.html
No tornados, mild thunderstorm, occasional hurricanes (but they are usually weakened a bit compared to, like, Florida by the time they get up here and they’ve spent a long time going up the coast so they tend to be well tracked by forecasters), some flooding but not much, and no earthquakes. Our bad weather events are usually blizzards, which you can see coming and which take a while to accumulate.
We’re right in the middle of the North American plate and the area is covered in gentle old hills and mountains.
So, we’re all just not used to the planet surprising us!