At least two articles, here and here, are saying that a storm made "landfall" in Brazil. To quote from the second source, which shows a satellite picture of a rotating low pressure system over the coast:

"A powerful cyclone with winds raging up to 120 kmph (75 mph) made landfall in the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina on Tuesday evening and moved westwards, to the Argentinean border."

This cyclone (the articles claim) was the cause of the tornado that crossed the Argentina/Brazil border last week, as well as flooding at the end of the week. Some incredible pictures from the MetSul Weather Center during this event can be seen throughout this blog entry. CNN says that the tornado had 125 mph winds and over 1 million lost power from last week's storms.

The quote above, of course, brings to mind 2004's Cyclone Catarina, quoted with exactly the same wind speed, hitting the same state in Brazil -- the only tropical storm to ever form in the South Atlantic (so far as anyone knows).

But in this case, there was just a "cyclone" (low-pressure system) that caused the bad weather, originating over land, moving OFFshore (no landfall), and was certainly not tropical. (As AccuWeather.com's Jim Andrews pointed out, it's late winter in the Southern Hemisphere; "Catarina" hit in March, late summer). This low pressure was a central player in an unusual severe weather situation.

How can we prove this? The synoptic weather maps below, provided by Alexandre Aguiar from MetSul, show the low pressure moving east from land to the ocean over time (maps are every 12 hours from Sept. 6 to Sept. 8 and are available for download in higher resolution here).

Alexandre said in an email "It was a conventional and CONTINENTAL low. No low made landfall. A thermal (warm) low deepened over Northern Argentina prior to the cold front. It was a quasi stationary low over land that deepened and favored the severe weather."

So what of the satellite image the article presented? It may have been stock footage. It is colored like a MODIS image but doesn't appear on their site here or here, and it doesn't match this Infrared image that was found by My Buddy Scott [JessePedia]...

Alexandre went on to talk about the power of the storm:

Here's a video that AccuWeather.com's Raychel Harvey-Jones did the day of the tornado:

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9/25605842001?isVid=1&publisherID=1612802193

I thank Alexandre for his detailed information and wish all of the areas affected in South America the best for recovery efforts, which I'm sure are ongoing. You can see even more information on this storm, including weather followups, radar images and newspaper clips, on the MetSul Blog (some of the highest weekly rainfall totals I found there were over 17 inches!)

By the way, I understand that there is a lot of confusion internationally when referring to a "cyclone" (which could mean low pressure, hurricane, or tornado in different languages) but here I see something that is really being misrepresented. Even if this storm would have come from the ocean (a Sou'easter??) according to WikiPedia only a "tropical cyclone" can "make landfall" -- a rule that I almost broke last week (except that AccuWeather.com considered the East Coast storm tropical so it was still a valid remark).

Report a Typo