weather bomb
weather bomb – sostantivo numerabile
UK weather bomb returns this weekend as temperatures plummet to -4C with Britain expecting 36 days of snow.
Britain will be hammered by Storm Abigail, recalling 2014’s ‘weather bomb‘, with forecasters predicting gusts of up to 70mph and possible snow this weekend.
Weather bombs happen fairly regularly. There are usually several each year and they are more common in winter.
Che ai britannici piaccia parlare del tempo è cosa risaputa, così come si sa che per i media le condizioni meteo avverse sono una manna, perché forniscono materia prima per articoli, servizi speciali e interviste a ‘esperti’ con poca spesa e fatica. La combinazione dei due fattori dà origine alla circolazione della miriade di notizie più o meno allarmistiche tipiche di questo periodo dell’anno. Alcune, come quella citata in apertura, risultano completamente infondate (il tempo si mantenne calmo e non ci furono nevicate di rilievo); altre, come quella che si riferisce alla tempesta nord-atlantica del 2014, sono sfortunatamente accurate: in certe zone al largo delle coste scozzesi si registrarono raffiche di vento a oltre 230 km/h. Ma questi fenomeni sono normali e relativamente frequenti, visto che il termine ‘bomba’ in meteorologia si usa quando strutture vorticose si approfondiscono molto velocemente con una pressione che scende di 1 hPa l’ora per almeno 24 ore.
Origini del termine
L’espressione weather bomb (bomba meteorologica) è in circolazione dagli anni ’40 ma negli anni recenti se ne è fatto un uso indiscriminato, senz’altro dovuto alla presa che la parola ‘bomb’ ha sulla fantasia del pubblico. Eppure il nome tecnico del fenomeno così banalmente descritto è assolutamente espressivo: ciclogenesi esplosiva.
weather bomb – countable noun
UK weather bomb returns this weekend as temperatures plummet to -4C with Britain expecting 36 days of snow.
Britain will be hammered by Storm Abigail, recalling 2014’s ‘weather bomb‘, with forecasters predicting gusts of up to 70mph and possible snow this weekend.
Weather bombs happen fairly regularly. There are usually several each year and they are more common in winter.
The British love of talking about the weather is well-known; the news media adore bad weather, as it gives them endless cheap copy. Combine the two and you have an explanation for the spate of ‘bad weather’ stories that tend to hit our pages and screens around this time of year. Some of these stories, such as the one in the first citation above have no foundation in fact – the weather remained calm and mild, and snow was nowhere to be seen except perhaps on the tops of the mountains. But the 2014 event was indeed dramatic, with winds of over 140mph recorded in some offshore areas of Scotland. This is where you would expect to find them, since the technical definition of a weather bomb is a rapidly developing storm at or north of 60° latitude in which barometric pressure at the centre of the storm drops by at least 24 millibars over a 24-hour period.
Origins
The term weather bomb has been around since the 1940s but its use has increased dramatically in recent years. This could have something to do with the attention-grabbing ‘bomb’ component of the compound, although the technical name for the phenomenon, explosive cyclogenesis, is also pretty exciting.
