Record breaking January drought, floods, freezes and early blooms
✍ Scribed by R.H.O.
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 1937
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 43 KB
- Volume
- 223
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0016-0032
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✦ Synopsis
Blooms.~The year I937 began with a month that will go down in weather history as a breaker of records for moisture, heat, and cold, a month of extreme contrasts, according to J. B. KINCER of the Weather Bureau. The outstanding result of the abnormal January weather is the devastating flood carried down to the Mississippi by the Ohio River and its tributaries. From January I to January 25 the clouds poured down on thousands of square miles of land a layer of water that would have been nearly I6 inches deep if none had run off. For example, a belt IOO miles wide, extending roughly 5o miles on each side of the Ohio River, and about 550 miles long-from the West Virginia boundary line to the Mississippi--was deluged with more than 6o billion tons of water. " This is too vast to register in the human mind," Mr. Kincer says, " so we may put it in another way. To count these 6o billion tons of water, at the rate of 3 a second, keeping at it continuously day and night would take more than 5oo years." Practically all of this rushed down into the streams. Already saturated with the December rainfall, the ground was incapable of absorbing any part of the January rains. Despite these unwanted rains in the East and helpful snows over most of the West, the need for more precipitation was acute in the Great Plains where the soil remained dry and subject to dust storms. The unseasonable freezes in southern California called for the use of millions of orchard heaters to save the citrus fruit crop. In marked contrast to these low temperatures were the high ones in the Southeast, where the extraordinary heat advanced vegetation precariously far beyond its normal stage.
:, R.H.O.