ROANOKE TIMES 

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, January 12, 1994                   TAG: 9401120163
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Knight-Ridder/Tribune
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

IN WEATHER, '93 HAD EVERYTHING

Floods! Drought! Heat! Cold! The Storm of the Century! You name it, we had it in 1993.

It was a year of extremes, breaking marks dating to before the Civil War, the National Weather Service reported Tuesday in its year-end review.

Sections of the Southeast sweated through the hottest summer on record, while four states in the Northwest enjoyed their coolest summer.

The normally parched Southwest soaked up one of its wettest winters, while the Southeast endured one of its worst droughts.

And violent winds, raging up to 110 mph, raked the East Coast from Florida to Maine in March, killing 320 people, toppling houses into the ocean and dumping snow over one-third of the nation.

The Weather Service dubbed it "The Storm of the Century" because such an event is expected only once in 100 years.

Forecasters can't explain the year's erratic pattern of weather extremes, but suggest that El Nino, that vast pool of warm water in the Pacific Ocean, is partly to blame.

El Nino normally comes and goes in 12- to 18-month cycles, but this time, the pattern has lasted three years.

Snow fell in Mobile, Ala., on the Gulf of Mexico. The barometric pressure in Columbia, S.C., sank lower than when Hurricane Hugo passed through.

The main event in the meteorological circus was what the weathermen called "The Great Flood of 1993."

Frank Richards, a flood expert at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, strained for ways to describe how much water poured through the Mississippi and Missouri River basins between June and September: 16,000,000,000,000,000 (quadrillion) gallons. That's four months' flow over Niagara Falls, enough to empty Lake Erie.

The rushing waters washed 16 billion tons of topsoil down the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico. Bits of Nebraska rounded the tip of Florida and rode the Gulf Stream as far as North Carolina, Richards said.

The last comparable flood occurred in 1903. The only one bigger struck in 1844, 150 years ago.

Keywords:
YEAR 1993 


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