The unprecedented Great Easter Flood was only the beginning of a year of meteorological extremes. July 1913 brought the hottest recorded temperature on Earth—still the record—in Death Valley, and November a bizarre “white hurricane” in the Great Lakes. And, oh yes, a nationwide drought. Why?
1913 was a year
of total weather whiplash.
After monumental
winter and early spring storm systems that brought unusually early tornadoes that
still—over a century later—count as Nebraska’s deadliest, plus sustained
intense rainfall across the Midwest that caused floods that still (2017) hold
records across Ohio and Indiana, it was almost as if a meteorological faucet suddenly
shut off.
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| In 1913, Death Valley reached the highest
temperature on Earth. (This happened six months after Death Valley set its own
record low temperature in January 1913. And 1913 was also Death Valley’s
wettest calendar year on record for 102 years.) Credit:
Trudy E. Bell
|
Nor was
Indiana alone: neighboring Illinois, Kentucky also sweltered. In Kansas and parts
of neighboring states, the corn crop failed. In Oklahoma and parts of Texas,
the cotton crop suffered. Over much of the country, fruits, nuts, and
vegetables withered. Indeed, the 1913 heat wave and drought was felt from New
England to the Rocky Mountains in a “period of about 12 weeks of almost
continuous excess of heat,” according to Monthly Weather Review of the National Weather Service, which devoted more than 24 pages of its September 1913 issue to discussing the
drought. The heat was accompanied by almost desert-like weather “with almost continuous
sunshine, frequent hot winds, and deficient humidity” that “combined to produce
one of the most disastrous seasons” on record.
In Death
Valley, in the midst of its own 1913 summer heat wave that had temperatures
bouncing off 125 and 130 degrees at Furnace Creek (then called Greenland
Ranch), that the mercury soared to 134 degrees Fahrenheit on July 10. First
cited as a high-temperature record for California, it later became recognized
as the “highest authentic natural-air temperature that…had ever been recorded
anywhere under approved conditions of equipment and exposure”—meaning anywhere in the world. (In 1922, it was claimed to be surpassed
on September 13 by a temperature of 136 degrees in Azizia, Tripoli—now El
Azizia, Libya—but in 2012 after nine decades of debate, an official
investigation by the World Meteorological Organization overturned that claim
due to instrumental and observer errors.) In short, the hottest temperature on the planet was recorded in Death Valley in summer 1913.
But wait,
there’s more. On January 8, 1913, Death Valley also reached its own low-temperature
record—9 degrees Fahrenheit. That may not sound like much to people in the
Midwest and Northeast, but “the great freeze” (as it came to be called) devastated
the citrus industry in southern California
and directly led to the U.S. Weather Bureau’s establishing of the fruit frost forecast program. And oh, yes, 1913 in Death Valley also set the record for being the wettest
calendar year (4.54 inches from January through December, more than double the
usual average annual rainfall of 1.94 inches)—a record sustained for more than
a century until broken by the “superbloom” year of 2005 (4.73 inches).
The ‘white
hurricane’
November 7–11,
1913, not even six months after the Great Easter deadly tornadoes and flood, another
tragic weather catastrophe struck the Midwest: the nation’s greatest inland marine disaster. Sustained winds of 50 to 70 mph reached hurricane-force with
gusts up to 90 mph whipped up waves as high as 35 feet on the Great Lakes,
sinking at least 12 ships and killing at least 250. Cleveland was buried under more than 17 inches of snow dropped in less than
24 hours.
A centennial
computational simulation revealed that (echoing the Great Easter storm system) disaster
came as a devastating one-two punch: a “pre-storm” of Nov. 7–8 followed by the
actual “white hurricane” to deliver what is called a “meteorological bomb.”
Whodunit?
Weather around
the world is always violent and setting records here and there. But the
confluence of so many exceptional and powerful events in 1913 (and 1912)
nonplused mariners and meteorologists alike at the time, along with others having
trained astute weather eyes. “Atmospheric conditions have been deranged the
world over for the last two years, and the oldest mariners say that nothing
like it has been known within their memory,” reported one newspaper account. “Weather
bureau officials say the last week or ten days” [meaning the time leading up to
the Great Easter tornadoes and floods] “has presented the most extraordinary situation
in regard to the weather that has existed since the creation of the bureau,”
reported another.
When in March
2006 I was driving back from a conference in Omaha and discussing this by
cellphone with the late historian of astronomy Craig B. Waff, he asked: “Do you
think something like a volcano could have been a cause? I’ll google on 1912 and
volcano. Bingo!” And he started reading aloud about Novarupta, the biggest
volcanic eruption of the 20th century, on the Katmai peninsula in Alaska.
Six months
later, I was able to write an article (published October 3 in Science@NASA)
about the possible effect that this high-latitude volcanic eruption might have
had on weakening the 1913 monsoons in India, based on computational simulations
at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. In 2006, when I was interviewing one of
the authors (Alan Robock of Rutgers), I asked about the possibility of
Novarupta’s also having some influence on the Great Easter storm system, but he
had not looked into U.S. effects.
Quite
independently, Air Force meteorologist Evan Kuchera—in his own reconstruction
of the 1913 Nebraska tornadoes (see “To Build a Tornado”)—had
also run across similar articles quoting the amazement of meteorologists at
1913 weather. “I take such comments very seriously, because meteorologists as a
group are not given to hyperbole,” Kuchera said.
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| My speculative question to the Omaha-Offutt chapter of the American Meteorological Society in a September 2014 presentation on the meteorology of the 1913 flood (same presentation was also the source of the other slides above). |
In September 2014, when I was
presenting an invited talk on the 1913 storm system to the Omaha-Offutt chapter
of the American Meteorological Society, I asked the audience of meteorologists
about the plausibility of some effect from such a major volcanic eruption. “Given
its placement, it likely would have had the effect of strengthening the North
Atlantic Oscillation, which could have had a forcing effect in the right
direction,” Kuchera mused.
To be sure,
a hypothesis is not a smoking gun, nor is a top-of-head hunch scientific proof.
But a volume published by the U.S. Geological Survey in 2012 for Novarupta’s centennial noted that aerosols from the powerful eruption were
still suspended in the stratosphere by late 1914, which likely would have
affected the radiation budget of the earth.
Historical measurements exist and modern feedback
is encouraging that the question is at least worth exploring in a quantitative
manner. I would welcome contact from
any computational climatologist or other expert who would be willing/able to
perform some kind of simulation using either the 20th Century Reanalysis Project
(as Sarah Jamison did for the rainfall of the 1913 flood; see “Be Very Afraid…” )
and/or another tool. Please e-mail me!
©2017 Trudy
E. Bell
Next time: Desperate Medicine
Selected references
November's Fury: The Deadly Great Lakes 1913 Hurricane by Michael Schumacher was published by the University of Minnesota in 2014. See also the older White Hurricane by David G. Brown, International Marine, 2002.
Bell, Trudy
E., The Great Dayton Flood of 1913, Arcadia Publishing, 2008. Picture
book of nearly 200 images of the flood in Dayton, rescue efforts, recovery, and
the construction of the Miami Conservancy District dry dams for flood control,
including several pictures of Cox. (Author’s shameless marketing plug: Copies
are available directly from me for the cover price of $21.99 plus $4.00
shipping, complete with inscription of your choice; for details, e-mail me), or order
from the publisher.
