12/28/12 Year In Weather Photos

Several very big weather stories happened this year from wildfires in California to Hurricane Sandy along the northeast coast, to bad ice storms in Switzerland. Below are the 10 best weather pictures (in my opinion) of this year.

10. Harveyville, Kansas: an EF2 tornado rips through this town on February 29th

9. Schwedt, Germany: Ice forms in unusual shapes around trees at a national park on February 15th.

8. Point Pleasant Beach, NJ: sand overflows a home thanks to Hurricane Sandy. The storm whipped up record high tide levels in Sandy Hook, N.J. and on the Delaware River in Philadelphia, which broke the previous records from another Superstorm back in March 1993.

7. Oahu, Hawaii: The hailstone pictured below measured 4.25" in length, about the same as a softball.

Thunderstorms hit the island with numerous hailstones of 2-3" diameter and larger on March 9. This not only broke the old record hail size, it shattered it (the previous record was 1”, about the size of a quarter).  While rain is common in Hawaii, and hurricanes make occasional appearances, thunderstorms occur only about 20-30 days each year on the islands.

6. Morse Reservoir, Indiana: Severe drought ravaged much of the country including the Midwest and southeast.

5. Henryville, Indiana: On March 3 dozens of people were killed by a tornado in this sleepy town.  A total of 69 tornadoes happened during this severe outbreak, two of which were EF4s (wind speeds of mph). However, just a few days later, a separate system brought snow accumulations of 1 to 3 inches to the tornado-damaged towns of Henryville and also West Liberty, Kentucky.

4. New Orleans: Here are pictures I took of The Crescent City Connection (also known as the Greater New Orleans Bridge) before Isaac hit, and during landfall in September. What was unusual abuot this storms is that after moving along at a fairly good pace while it was over water in the Gulf of Mexico, Isaac slowed to a snail’s pace once inland. It moved a total of only 145miles in 24 hours which caused the massive flooding to inland towns in Louisiana.  

3. Hoboken, NJ: taxis basically floating in flood waters from Hurricane Sandy on October 30. Almost two weeks after Sandy made landfall, 150,000 customers were still without power in New York and New Jersey. 

2. Union Beach, NJ: the Princess Cottage Inn had half of it taken by Hurricane Sandy. Out of only 1000 homes in this sleepy town, over 200 of them were deemed uninhabitable. Sandy's tropical storm-force winds extended 943 miles across at its widest point while moving up the East Coast, the largest purely tropical storm wind field since such records have been kept since 1988, according to Weather Underground's Dr. Jeff Masters.

1. Versoix, Switzerland: a massive ice storm almost crippled the city near Lake Geneva on February 5, 2012.Geneva resident and photographer Jean-Pierre Scherrer commented on how bad the weather conditions actually were, “After a conjunction of intense cold (-8 to -12 degrees Centigrade), plus very strong winds, blowing at over 70 mph, the waves got so harsh that they passed over the dikes and the droplets immediately froze everything they touched!”

 Sources: weather.com, NASA, NOAA, Getty Images