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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

If any west-coasters are confused as to how this is news: the Northeast is sort of geologically unusual for the US in that we have almost no surprising, sudden weather thingies.

No tornados, mild thunderstorm, occasional hurricanes (but they are usually weakened a bit compared to, like, Florida by the time they get up here and they’ve spent a long time going up the coast so they tend to be well tracked by forecasters), some flooding but not much, and no earthquakes. Our bad weather events are usually blizzards, which you can see coming and which take a while to accumulate.

We’re right in the middle of the North American plate and the area is covered in gentle old hills and mountains.

So, we’re all just not used to the planet surprising us!

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We're also on a shelf of hard rock, so a quake in NJ is felt by all of New England. Keys on the wall were shaking here 100mi away.

I felt it in Boston, albeit very faintly

Also, earthquakes on the east coast travel further, and are more likely to damage structures than earthquakes of the same magnitude on the west coast[0]. That's due to underlying geological differences.

The magnitude is one immediately-available measure of the strength of an earthquake, but it's not the only measurement that's relevant to determining the size or impact of an earthquake. Depth, duration, location - there are many other measurable (and also immeasurable) factors which parameterize a seismic event.

[0] https://www.usgs.gov/news/featured-story/east-vs-west-coast-...

I cannot speak for California, but in PNW there is even less “surprising, sudden weather thingies.”

Rain is not pouring, unlike on east coast (speaking from my expeirences in both NYC and Atlanta), it is just drizzling at a very low rate. It doesnt thunderstorm. I’ve heard thunder iirc only 2-3 times in my 7 years living there. No tornados or tsunamis. No massive blizzards out of nowhere. I felt this earthquake in NYC today myself, and I remember having a similarly strong eathquake in Seattle only a couple of times.

I have no idea where this “west coast and its sudden weather thingies” take comes from (again, I cannot speak for California), but it runs counter to everything I’ve personally experienced.

I thought California had a lot of Earthquakes.

Oregon is full of volcanoes and about to slip off the continental shelf, right? But I guess those surprises just exists in potential form.

I have lived in California for something like 33 of my 36 years. I have actually felt a grand total of 3 earthquakes in my entire life. Even out here, quakes big enough to shift the wall decorations across a large portion of the state are vanishingly rare.

Uh... This is incorrect, and probably largely dependent on where exactly you live. Just go look at an earthquake swarm map of CA. Near the fault in Los Angeles have been dozens if not more of small/midsized/large quakes that could produce the effects you're talking about. I had one in my office just the other week that freaked everyone out.

I'm not saying there aren't earthquakes. I'm saying actually feeling/noticing them is extremely rare in my experience. Maybe I have just lived in exactly the right places over the years. Probably many happened when I was doing something that masked them, but nonetheless in over 30 years I have noticed just a few quakes, and only one was significant enough to leave any evidence in the form of moved objects.

> in PNW there is even less “surprising, sudden weather thingies.”

I'd put the constant wildfires in the weather thing bucket.

I've definitely seen a few "pouring rainstorms" this year where I'm at in the PNW. If you live in the Seattle area you're actually in the rain shadow of the Olympics, but when you get to about Mountlake Terrace to just south of Everett you're in a convergence zone and get all the weather that diverted around the northern half of the Olympics, so you can get a crazy amount of water there. I've also seen a LOT of rain just touring the Olympic coast(The Hoh rainforest is the wettest forest in the US), and also out on the San Juan islands and in the Bellingham area.

I've also been day hiking after work and gotten more than a few heavy rains. One of which almost gave me hypothermia because it snuck up on me while I was in the woods on top of something during one of those drizzles you're referring to.

There actually are tornados in the PNW. Both Washington and Oregon get about 1.7 per year. Here are maps of the tornados here since 1950 for Washington [1] and Oregon [2].

For Washington, in the 134 tornados since 1950 there were 6 fatalities, 303 direct injuries, and $31 million in damages. However most of that was from a single bad year, 1972, which had 4 tornados and all 6 of those fatalities, along with 301 of the 303 injuries. $25 million of the damages were from that year, too.

For Oregon it was 130 tornados since 1950, with 0 fatalities and 5 injuries. $32 million in damages. Like Washington most of the damage came from one year, 1968, with $25 million in damages.

Even though they are rare it turns out that we do have a functioning tornado warning system here. I found this out a few years when my iPhone started blaring a very loud alarm--louder than anything I'd ever heard from it before.

[1] https://datacentral.kitsapsun.com/tornado-archive/

[2] https://data.statesmanjournal.com/tornado-archive/

Louder than those about a spotted wanted honda civic?

I count fires as a form of weather in CA, would probably apply to the PNW too

I grew up in New England, but have lived in California for 30 years. A 4.7 is waaay larger than anything I've personally felt here!

Plus the Northeast is just not made for quakes. The 200 year old house I grew up in would probably have creaked pretty alarmingly.

House I'm renovating here in the northeast had the concrete in the basement poured yesterday... Going to head over there to see if any weirdness occurred

Good way of removing any trapped air!

This one weird trick seismologists don’t want you to know about!

> almost no surprising, sudden weather thingies

I had never been anywhere near a hurricane in my life before I moved to NYC. I thought that was just something you worried about in the Caribbean or occasionally Florida.

Everything gets amplified on the East coast, any event, since much of the media we consume originates there.

The PNW does get tremendously powerful Pacific cyclones every so often [0]. These are huge storms that would do real damage to mid-Atlantic cities.

And there's the known risk of the "big one" -- subduction zone quake, Seattle fault, etc. Sleep tight East coast, you'll be fine.

[0] - https://www.climate.washington.edu/stormking/mainindex.html

I think the term you may be seeking is 'seismic event'

We do get tornados in NJ. About 3 per year.

Yeah, our reaction to this here is reminding me of what happens when Oregon or Atlanta gets an inch of snow. An earthquake (that is felt) is just not something that we experience often.

I remember when Atlanta got 2" and people were literally abandoning their cars on highways [1], whereas in the northeast people are out driving in blizzards.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/01/30/268720258...

You think the west coast has tornados and hurricanes? West coast by the pacific ocean has even milder weather than the east.

I think you’re drawing the wrong conclusion from the post. There was no suggestion of tornadoes on the West Coast. It was a discussion of relatively isolated meteorological phenomena in the northeast corridor.

While not part of Tornado Alley, the west coast does get tornadoes. There was at least one when I lived there, and I think I heard about another within the past year (maybe two). The one when I lived there actually started as a waterspout and came across the beach near Santa Monica to be reclassified as a tornado.

I'm not sure how this thread got off on this tangent but I don't think there was ever any attempt to comment on whether there are or are not tornadoes on the west coast. The discussion was the lack of extreme events typical of the northeast.

It's more about the details left out really. I lived in LA area for ~5 years, and 1 tornado. In one Tornado Alley storm system, you can get multiple twisters. There's of course more than one storm system per season. It's also just weird knowing that for a tornado to hit places like Santa Monica and the knowledge that tornadoes usually travel southwest to northeast, and that there is no more land west of Santa Monica, that they are going to form as waterspouts. That's just unusual for typical experience for Tornado Alley folks.

Just another example of how one person's typical experience with storms can still be unusual when experience some place else.

Sure, my original comment was very ambiguous about what I've just posted, but that's how the tangent worked in my mind.

>mild thunderstorm

What!?! We have some doozies here in the summer. (Finger Lakes region of NY.)

We had some allright thunderstorms in MA, but I lived briefly in the Midwest and—they have these thunderstorms that are still scary even when you are inside. It is bizarre.

Agreed! Grew up in Illinois. Live in CT now. Miss those summer thunderstorms in the midwest.

i live in dallas, about 10 years ago there was a small tornado skipping up and down about 3 miles north of me (they typically move SW to NE). I got in the car to "chase" it and made it to the end of my street. It was so ominous looking I turned around and went back home.

> It was so ominous looking I turned around and went back home.

We have a word for that...smart.

we've had tornadoes in NJ..

The East Coast gets microtornadoes that deshingle roofs or tip trees over.

The Midwest gets MS Paint eraser tool tornadoes.

The East Coast gets EF3 and EF4 tornadoes.

We get about one a decade in upstate NY.

NYC seems to have been taken quite by surprise by a storm last September.

What is a Nor'easter?

A lot of cold water and maybe snow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_1992_nor%27easter

its a lot of warm moisture that comes up the coast from the southeast and slams into cold air from canada and can drop a lot of snow/wind. It can cause bad storms in the ocean and high seas.

> What is a Nor'easter?

Literally: a cold hurricane.

Some people misuse the term to mean "a blizzard affecting New England and/or the Northeast", but it actually specifically refers to a storm that's been pushed inland by sea winds coming from the northeast, off the Atlantic Ocean. That specific pattern results in a particularly cold and brutal storm.

Nor'easters are technically cyclones, just like hurricanes, and the two are very similar in many regards. The difference is that a Nor'easter forms further north, in cold water, and it is actually strengthened by cold air, whereas hurricanes form further south and are diminished in strength as they cool off.

https://scijinks.gov/noreaster/

Weather nerds will get very confused by ‘a cold hurricane’ since hurricanes are tropical cyclones and tropical cyclones have a warm core by definition.

…but they’ll be fine with a ‘a big cold cyclone’ I guess ;)

> Weather nerds will get very confused by ‘a cold hurricane’ since hurricanes are tropical cyclones and tropical cyclones have a warm core by definition.

Well, it's literally true: a hurricane is a tropical cyclone, and a nor'easter is an extratropical cyclone. A nor'easter is literally the "cold" counterpart of a hurricane!

So like, the Nor'easter is a cryo-cyclone and the regular hurricanes are pyro-cyclones!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nor'easter

It’s just a hurricane in the winter, no biggie. We would enjoy the snow and check out the surf (from a safe distance). I think you aren’t officially supposed to suggest the latter though.

I mean, it really isn't a huge deal, but the nor'easter that just came across us here in southern maine left about 350k people without power in a state of 1.6 million people.

That's not nothing.

I throw on a dry suit and go surfing. It's awesome.

Eh, there are plenty of areas of the northeast that are affected much differently by these events than where you are. For example, Vermont has had multiple catastrophic floods in memory, including last summer and Hurricane Irene. Mountainous and coastal areas magnify these systems, the lowlands and developed megalopolis region may be truer to your claims.

I am very confused with you classifying earthquakes under "weather thingies"

Natural disaster thingies

We can have natural disasters they just have to schedule beforehand.

The thought process was: I know earthquakes aren’t really weather, so I’ll tack on “thingies” to make it clear that I’m making up some new more generalized term.

The point was to group all the… I dunno, whatever, surprising attacks by the planet into one thing. I can’t think of a real term for this, I think there might not be one, I guess I could call it something like “weather or geological surprises” but that’s just dull.

Sim City "Disaster" menu items

A taxonomy my monkey brain can actually understand.

The SC2K siren sfx file just played itself in my head.

Natural disasters

Acts of God as the insurance industry calls them!

It just illustrates how people in the NE think about natural disasters. Basically any big natural event is weather-related.

When the 2011 Virginia quake happened, I was somewhere in the Boston area sitting in my parked car, and at first I thought it was a strong wind rocking my car side-to-side. It took a few seconds for me to realize the shaking wasn't a "weather thing"

Natural phenomena, extending beyond what's strictly weather, often get lumped into "meteorology", including earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes. One fairly well-known case is the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA), whose remit includes not just weather by hydrology, seismology, and volcanology.

Generally: concerns of an extra-human, non-biological origin. E.g., JMA doesn't address pandemics.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Meteorological_Agency>

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