GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – A number of tornadoes have torn through several states in the centre and south of the US and the death toll now stands at 31, but there are fears it will rise as rescue workers check rubble. The deaths occurred in four states: Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio and Alabama, but areas in at least three other states have tornado watches in place.
It’s unusual to have such a high number of deadly storms. Twisters usually occur later in the year, as the weather warms up.
Links to other sites: CNN, NPR, Storm Prediction Ceneter, US Weather Service
More en route, so don't put the shovels away yet (Valais, January 2012)
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The weather people have given it a name already: winter storm Andrea is en route and we can expect snow down to 400 metres in the Jura and Lake Geneva regions.
Snow should fall down to the plain in canton Valais, with high winds in mountain areas.
The Jura can expect gusts of up to 180kph from Thursday morning to Friday.
Ski slopes are likely to be closed for much of Thursday and Friday due to high winds; check local conditions and openings. Alpine areas are likely to have 40-60cm of fresh snow before the weekend.
Two die as high winds sweep the region
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Winds of up to 100mph in Scotland and other parts of Britain 3 January are causing considerable damage, with some areas suffering power cuts and transport disrupted, including the London-Edinburgh trains. A man died in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, in southern England when a tree fell on his van and a sailor, one of three injured on a boat in the Channel, died after they were rescued.
Weather alerts remain in place, with strong winds expected throughout the night.
Rolle, Lake Geneva, 16 December 2011
GENEVA / ZURICH, SWITZERLAND – Zurich airport is suffering major disruptions due to storms Friday evening 16 December and Geneva airport saw delays during the day, as winter blew into Switzerland with a vengeance.
Valais police are reporting several roads closed due to heavy snow, and the car/train link between Goppenstein and Kandersteg was closed Friday. Trees are down in several parts of Vaud, with one tree hitting three cars in Lausanne.
Joachim is the name of the storm that blasted its way across parts of the Jura and Bern Friday morning, bringing high winds and storms that churned up Lake Neuchatel.
Zurich airport reported some cancelled or delayed flights Friday morning, notably from Nice, London and Amsterdam, all affected by storms. By Friday evening Swiss was sending people to a “bad weather in Europe” page and Zurich airport was showing several flights cancelled or delayed, including Paris and London flights.
Geneva airport, which opened its new visitor center officially 16 December was only lightly touched, with some London flights cancelled and minor delays as the Lake Geneva region was drenched by winds and torrential rains.
The Swiss Institute for snow and avalanche danger has put most of canton Valais on a red alert (level 4) for avalanche danger. Postal cars on the Gampel-Steg and Blatten (Lötschen) line are not running because of the danger of avalanches.
Weather has also closed several regional train lines, including Rochers-de-Naye.
Lake Geneva at Rolle 16 December, looking towards Evian and the French Alps where the clouds are dumping snow
The Rhone (top of photo) was swollen by rains at the end of the week and during the weekend, but water levels fell Sunday
BERN, SWITZERLAND – Genoa, Italy is cleaning up after Liguria’s Friday floods, which followed those of a week earlier centred around nearby Spezia. Four people are reported dead and scores injured after flash floods 4 November.
France’s Var region was hard hit by floods over the weekend, with a retired couple missing and presumed dead after their car was washed away in flooding. Le Monde reports that 1,300 people were evacuated, with more than 300 ml of rain falling in three days, an amount normally seen in three months.
Switzerland’s southern regions, notably Ticino, and some Alpine areas in other cantons were on high alert at the start of the weekend with water levels high, but by late Sunday Meteo Swiss had lifted the danger alerts, with water levels falling for the Rhone and Lakes Lugano and Majore.
Swiss natural disaster alerts are listed on a federal web page, www.dangers-naturels.ch
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Hurricanes and tropical storms in Asia and North America, torrential rains in Africa: heavy rains and flooding are causing heavy damage and deaths. Irene drifted from a hurricane to a tropical storm by the time it hit New York, and while damage was less than feared, the storm killed 16 people in six US states over the weekend. Staten Island firefighters rowed scores to safety when flooding reached five feet, nearly two metres.
Eastern Uganda has had torrential rains that have rotted crops and poisoned some of the maize aid supplies, with cholera and hepatitis outbreaks feared. A government official says that water purification tablets and mosquito nets are urgently needed to stem poor sanitation related diseases.
Southwestern Nigeria, around the city of Ibadan, has had heavy flooding, with at least 20 people dead after a dam broke.
Fifteen provinces in Thailand have been warned to expect heavy monsoon flooding, as the country hunkers down for continuing torrential rains, with high sea waves of two to three metres expected in the Andaman Sea.
Links to other sites: allAfrica, Bangkok Post, BNO news, NY Times
Update 21:50 GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Expect change! Geneva Friday night is experiencing heavy storms, as they build up to the east. Trains on the Geneva-Lausanne run are suffering 15-20 minute delays and a tree has fallen on the tracks near Rolle, reports TSR. Valais police have sent out a news alert asking media to inform the public that the danger level is ex 4 out of 5, rather than 4 to 5 – and please, they ask, don’t phone the police for weather forecasts!
Meteoswiss, the national weather service, in May moved to a new system for danger alerts: 4 out of 5 is described as “a dangerous meteorological event is expected that is unusual for the season.”
The weekend weather will shift from Friday afternoon’s occasional bursts of sun to storms starting along the Jura, with hail expected in some areas and falling temperatures.
Weekend highs in the French-speaking part of Switzerland should be 20-22C with evening temperatures falling to 8C. Snow will fall down to 2,000 metres.
The Swiss Alps in canton Valais will have gusting winds but temperatures will be higher thanks to warm, dry foehn winds initially, followed by strong northwest winds in the mountains and breezes in the valleys.
Sunday should be clement, with sunshine and highs of 22C.
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Air Lingus, BA and Ryanair late Monday canceled several flights from Ireland and England to Scotland, with volcanic ash threatening northern Europe’s skies following the latest volcanic eruption in Iceland. Grimsvoetn in southeastern Iceland began to spew ash late Saturday 23 May and weather forecasters say ash could reach Scotland Tuesday, forcing airlines to cancel. The volcano is said by experts to most likely be Iceland’s strongest since the 1950s. The rest of the British Isles may be spared the ash for now, thanks to southeasterly winds.
Scotland was also hit by unseasonable weather, with winds gusting up to 150mph, power lines down and ferries and rail lines forced to close. One person died when a tree fell on his car and at the height of the storm 50,000 people were without electricity.
US President Barack Obama was able to travel from Ireland to England for the next leg of his European visit, despite storms and ash clouds to the north.
Links to other sites: Irish Times, The Scotsman
Australia’s neighbour New Zealand has been watching the lethal floods and storms in Australia, keeping a comfortable distance, but some residents of the land where the Hobbits make movies have been asking why extreme weather conditions seem to skirt around them.
The New Zealand Herald took time out from Australia-watching to explain: “New Zealand is unaffected by such a monstrous weather event because it does not have the warm oceans needed to fuel a tropical cyclone. Our geography protects us from the worst cyclones because we are too far south of the tropics. Australia’s east coast, on the other hand, is firmly in the middle of the tropics and their cyclone-producing warm currents.”
Cyclones, the paper says, come out of ocean waters that are at least 27C, whereas New Zealand’s coastal waters are never warmer than 25C.
Only once, in 1968, have winds of cyclone 5 strength been recorded in New Zealand, the Herald notes, the result of a rare incidence of a drifting tropical storm meeting a polar storm.
Links to other sites: New Zealand Met Office, New Zealand Tourism Office on weather
The northeastern US is snowed in by blizzards, and with the three main airports in New York closed down due to snow, travel throughout the country is disrupted. NPR reports that 2,000 flights were cancelled in New York alone, but the storm has brought gusting winds of up to 128kph and heavy snowfalls from Maine to the Carolinas, with 50cm of snow in New York. Tour buses had food and water delivered by police after the buses were stranded on New Jersey’s Garden State Parkway because tow trucks couldn’t reach them with five foot drifts, according to CNN.
Bern's fireworks for the Swiss national holiday were cancelled due to rain but on the other side of the Alps, towns were able to have displays
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch.com) - The First of August national holiday in Switzerland was not a quiet one for emergency services. The east of the country was swept by high winds and rain late in the day and during the night from Sunday to Monday, causing flooding in Schwytz and St Gallen. A man drowned in Lake Constance, in the Valais resort of Crans-Montana a car veered out of control in the village centre and injured seven.
The accident in Crans-Montana occurred shortly after noon Sunday 1 August when a 74-year-old man lost control of his car for reasons that are not yet clear, drove onto a sidewalk where he hit five people, then hit the window of a bakery, damaging several vehicles in the process.
Storms opened up around 20:00 Sunday evening in central and eastern Switzerland, causing streams to overflow, blocking roads in some areas, but also putting a damper on holiday fireworks planned in canton Bern and notably at the Bruenig Pass. The city of Bern received a heavy dose: 2 cm of rain in less than an hour. Winds in Neuchatel and La Broye reached 90 kph, according to the national weather service and hail fell in some areas of the country.
A 49-year-old man fell into Lake Constance from his boat late Sunday when a storm suddenly whipped up on the lake and part of their equipment went into the water. The man fell overboard while trying to get it back. The friend who was with him tried to pull him back into the boat, unsuccessfully. She called police immediately and a 50-person, 15-boat international rescue team spent four hours looking for him, to no avail. The search continues Monday morning.
Links to other sites: TSR (Fre), 20 Minutes (Fre)
Click on images to view larger: split-second series showing gusting winds in Saint Prex, canton Vaud, Thursday evening, in less than one minute
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – After central Switzerland, the weather demons turned on western Switzerland’s Jura mountain range and La Côte, with windy storms late Monday afternoon 12 July. Winds gusted to well over 100 kph in several areas, according to MeteoSwiss, the national weather service.
Vaud police say they received 122 emergency calls between 17:00 and 19:00. Several people in pedalos near Ouchy/Lausanne and amateur sailors were rescued by lake emergency teams and staff from the Compagnie générale de navigation (CGN) when winds on the lake suddenly whipped up to 90 kph. Shortly after, emergency teams rescued others on Lake Neuchatel. Several pleasure craft on Lake Geneva were tossed from their moorings and police evacuated the VD 8 campground at Cheseaux-Noréaz after trees fell on some of the caravans and some 100 campers’ tents were threatened by other trees.
Campers at the Morges TCS campground on the shore of Lake Geneva held onto their wildly flapping tents. British campers Pat Stevens and her husband Bob said they repegged their tent when they saw red dust from the nearby tennis courts rising in one-storey high clouds.
The CFF trains were badly disrupted by a tree blowing over on the rail line at Rolle: between Gland and Allaman, on the heavily travelled Lausanne-Geneva tracks, rail service was halted from 17:55 to 18:55. Intercity and Inter-regio trains from Lucerne remained out of service for longer, with traffic limited to one track while the tree was removed and repairs were made.
Hot days with evening storms are expected to continue for the next week, a boon for swimming pools in the region, which suffered from under-attendance during the first cold month of the season, but which are now packing the crowds like sardines during the day.
The storms also swept other parts of Switzerland. News service ats reports that 24 people were rescued by boat and helicopter from the banks of the Kloentalersee when their cars were trapped between two mud and rock slides during a violent storm that began abruptly and caught them by surprise. Two passes, the Albula and Susten, were closed until Tuesday to clear up rock slides set off by heavy mountain storms.
Links to other sites: 20 Minutes, GenevaLunch weather forecasts from the national weather service
Eleven people are missing after heavy rain and flooding washed out bridges and roads, and put towns under several feet of water in England and Scotland. The storms were expected but their impact nevertheless caught many areas by surprise. Cumbria in England, on the border with Scotland, was the worst-hit area. Heavy rain and gale-force winds are forecast in the area and for much of the UK in the next few days. Flood alerts are continuing and some rail service is likely to be disrupted.
Just a week after Typhoon Ketsana caused massive flooding in the Philippines, including major flooding in the capital, Manila, Typhoon Parma hit land in Luzon late Saturday 3 October, promising to dump 20-50 cm new rain on the area. Winds of 145 kph, gusting up to 185, wreaked havoc, but the larger concern was more flooding and mudslides. Manila avoided a direct hit as the storm changed course, but northern regions are reporting heavy damage and four deaths. Al Jazeera, CNN
A devastating storm tore through southern Ontario, Canada 20 August, generating tornadoes along the way, several of which destroyed houses and flipped vehicles. One person was killed near Durham, Ontario. In Minneapolis, Minnesota, a violent storm struck unexpectedly Wednesday, 19 August, uprooting trees, damaging houses and cars. MinnPost.com, Toronto Globe & Mail
Storms have battered Switzerland in recent days
Hail balls hit orchards in Etoy, 23 July
Update 14:25 Bern and Lucerne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Heavy storms that crossed central Switzerland around 21.45 Monday night caused extensive damage, with firemen called to two houses in Bern that were struck by lightning, which also hit a swimming pool and electric line. Roads were closed and cellars flooded in canton Lucern. A pork house was hit by lightning on a Lucern farm, but the 200 pigs were saved, reports ats/romandie.
Damage from the 23 July hail storm that hit Vaud and central Switzerland is now estimated at CHF180 million, TSR reports.
Storm arrives, Swiss Alps
Lake Geneva region (GenevaLunch) - Lake Geneva residents returning from holidays Friday 17 July are asking, “Has it been like this for the past couple weeks?” No! It’s been hot and sunny and too dry. Friday evening has brought an excess of relief: a blast of very cool area to many parts of Switzerland, with heavy rains and thunderstorms much of the night, following a night and day of stormy weather, with hail and wind in Ticino, Bern and some other areas.
Weather forecast: expect more of the same, with highs of 20C until Monday, with temperatures climbing steadily for the rest of the week.
