On this date in Weather History…
…in 1494…Columbus encountered what was probably the first hurricane in his sailing across the Atlantic as he was off the coast of Hispaniola.
…in 1945…Weather forecasts were critical in the testing of the first nuclear device at the Trinity Site on the Alamogordo Bombing Range in New Mexico. Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Manhattan Project, looked to a civilian forecast, Jack Hubbard for a forecast ten days in advance. A thunderstorms the evening before threatened the test, but Hubbard assured Oppenheimer that the weather would clear. He turned out to be right and the test went flawlessly. The Atomic Age was born.
…in 1993… The Great Midwest Flood continued. All bridges across the Mississippi River between Burlington Iowa and St. Louis (212 miles) are closed by the flooding and would be shut down until the 20th.
…in 1998…A dramatic and mysterious cooling of waters in the northeast Gulf of Mexico was killing fish and chilling bathers along the beaches of the Florida Panhandle. Coastal water temperatures from near the Alabama line to as far east as Panama City, FL., plunged suddenly from the upper 80s to the low70s, the kind of surf temperatures that could be expected off of Cape Cod in mid-July. The clear, cold water killed all fish life with its extraordinarily low levels of dissolved oxygen. The best scientific guess is that the cold water welled up from the DeSoto Canyon about 30 miles or so off of the Panhandle.
