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The first snow reports of the season across the Midwest and Northeast were reported over the weekend of October 17th, 2015. Snow was generally trace amounts but a few areas in western New York, northwest Pennsylvania, and Michigan saw an inch or more. In general, this first glimpse of winter came early compared to the averages but no records were broken in terms of the earliest measurable snow. The table shows the average date for the first measurable snowfall and the record for the earliest measured snowfall for a few major cities across the United States.

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South America is not as well known for it’s wild weather as the USA’s Tornado Alley is, yet the southern continent is still home to some of the world’s strongest storms. The Pampas region in Argentina, Uruguay and southern Brazil frequently experiences these storms, making it one of the most active region for severe weather outside of North America. So what makes it so similar to the Great Plains? It really comes down to geography. Severe storms require certain ingredients to come together – primarily cold air colliding with warm, moisture rich air. In the USA, this happens when cold air from Canada meets warm air from the Gulf of Mexico. In the Pampas, cold air from Patagonia and Antarctica to the south (remember this is in the southern hemisphere, so south = cold, north = warm) meets warm air from the rainforests of Brazil. With the region being in the mid-latitudes, about as far south as Tornado Alley is north, the winds throughout the atmosphere are also very similar, allowing for severe weather “ingredients” to come together just as they do in the US.

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Flying into the eye of Hurricane Patricia aboard the Lockhead WP-3D

With a minimum central pressure of 878.4 mb, Hurricane Patricia will go into the record books as the most intense storm ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere. It is only the second time that such a powerful storm has struck the Mexican Pacific coast. The last time this happened was in 1959, when almost 2000 people perished in a devastating category 5 hurricane.
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The tranquil pattern that dominated U.S. weather through the Fall was broken abruptly during the first week of October by a catastrophic flood event in the Southeast, South Carolina being the hardest hit. Like many extreme weather events, it can be blamed on a highly improbable combination of separate meteorological factors, any one of which by itself probably wouldn’t have been noteworthy at all.

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