Sou'wester Hits Brazil With Storm Surge, Waves

I wanted to draw your attention to an article and video on AccuWeather.com about the continuing bad weather in Brazil. This is something that I brought to the attention of our News Team yesterday and they did a great job reporting on it. Rio de Janeiro lost at least 170 people in a flood early this week when a cold front caused heavy upsloping rain, to the tune of 15 inches. This caused major landslides and flooding, leading to the death toll. The Washington Post says that this disaster's death toll will likely pass the massive flood in 1966 there which killed 250, and that over $207 million in aid has been requested.

This week, as if they needed something else to worry about, what I'm calling a "Sou'wester" (the Southern Hemisphere equivalent of a Nor'easter) developed. These storms aren't rare off the Brazilian coast, but they are not usually that far north, and the positioning is causing a storm surge and waves to 15 feet at Rio. Check out this video showing waves crashing onto the airport runway.

In order to better understand the situation down there, I interviewed Alexandre Alexandre Aguiar, who works for the METSUL Meteorological Center in Brazil (and has a lot of impressive maps & photos on their blog, which is in Portuguese). Here is his explanation of the bad weather:

The image above shows the analysis of waves yesterday as estimated by the WaveWatch computer forecast model.