AccuWeather's Dave Dombek breaks down the historical average of a derecho occurring across the U.S., what constitutes a derecho and the challenges of forecasting these storms.
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00:00The derecho is a widespread, long-lived windstorm that is associated with a band of rapidly moving showers or thunderstorms.
00:06And by definition, if the wind-damaged swath extends more than 400 miles,
00:10includes wind gusts of at least 58 miles per hour or greater along most of its length,
00:13with a width of at least 60 miles per hour, then the event may be classified as a derecho.
00:19These windstorms, of course, can cause significant damage and pose serious risks and threats to communities in their path,
00:24including right here in the northeastern portions of the United States.
00:28And that's why we bring in AccuWeather Northeast expert David Dombeck,
00:31some 40, almost 50 years of experience forecasting in the Northeast?
00:3545. You're close.
00:3745. Perfect. I asked Bernie, so if it's wrong, we bring him down with us.
00:41All right. Let's get back.
00:43We're talking about how rare a derecho could be in the area and why these are just so difficult to forecast.
00:49Yeah, this it is.
00:51And we'll kind of talk about the difficulty of forecasting these events.
00:55First of all, it's one of those things where sometimes we we look at all the parameters,
01:01we really do our homework, we try to hone in on an area and we end up missing it totally or maybe we get the wrong area.
01:07They're just a very difficult phenomena to forecast.
01:11And other times when we we don't expect one and then all of a sudden, you know, there's one there and then we have to really scramble and now cast.
01:19So they are not an easy phenomena to forecast.
01:23But typically, you know, springtime, mid, late spring, into the summer months, early to mid summer.
01:29And oftentimes you'll see these around the the edge or the periphery of a big upper level ridge,
01:36sort of near the edge of the heat and humidity.
01:38And once they get going, boy, they're just well, that's exactly what the name means.
01:43You know, derecho, it's a Spanish term that pretty much just means straight.
01:47And it is it is a very difficult phenomena to to forecast.
01:52I just taught me something there.
01:53All right.
01:53So some areas that have been just inundated with storms and the heavy rainfall.
01:57But then the other side of, say, even the state of Pennsylvania over to New Jersey has been dealing with drought.
02:03We got the newest drought monitor in for today.
02:05And as we were talking, there are different types of drought.
02:08Right.
02:09There's really there's two types of drought.
02:10There's the short term drought, which it's very easy to get into a short term drought.
02:16And that's if you have a home garden, you're trying to care for your lawn, your flowers outside or whatever.
02:23And it hasn't rained for two, three weeks or whatever.
02:25Your grass starts to brown up.
02:27Your garden is, you know, the plants are wilting and you have to water it constantly.
02:31Those kind of short term droughts are very easy to get into very quick.
02:35But it's also easy to get out of them with one one or two good rains.
02:40The long term drought is much more serious situation because that's a cumulative effect of of one dry spell after another after another building on top of each other.
02:50And a long term drought is more on the order of many, many weeks, more like months and sometimes even years.
02:56So it takes a long time to get into a long term drought, but it also takes a lot of effort to get out of a long term drought.
03:06Yeah, I think important, right, because we've had rainstorms.
03:08We've had a rain moving on through, but it's going to take quite some time.
03:11And before we get to the future, not only have you been forecasting into the northeast, you also a resident of Florida and they have been dealing with the drought.
03:19We take a look at the current drought monitor across the Sunshine State.
03:21Exactly. There are some places there. If you look at some of the deficits going back to like early November, West Palm Beach, for example, you know,
03:31they should have had, what, 15, 16, 17 inches of of rain by now since then.
03:37And we're way, way, way below those those numbers.
03:40So the drought has just gotten more and more serious.
03:43And, of course, we've had some brush fire situations and everything.
03:45The good news for Florida going forward is that the pattern is going to turn somewhat wetter over the next couple of weeks, which is good.
03:54How much we are able to alleviate the drought situation remains to be seen, but we'll definitely have some relief.
04:00And certainly up in the mid-Atlantic, parts of Maryland, south-central, southeastern Pennsylvania, portions of New Jersey,
04:08although not as widespread as before, and a few portions up in New England and southeast New York State,
04:14they will get some much-needed rain in the days ahead over the next several days to a week or so.
04:20And so we will put somewhat of a dent in the long-term drought situation there.
04:25The places that are on the border, they may be done after this rainy spell coming up, we may be done.
04:32The places that have a deeper hole to dig out of, it might take a few or several good rain events to really finally get out of the drought.
04:41Amazing. Thank you so much, AccuWeather Northeast expert David Donbeck.
04:44We appreciate you joining us and all the information you provided this morning.
04:47You bet. Have a great morning.