Which Storm Took Down Myer-Womble Observatory?
High winds at 14,000 feet took out the U.S.'s highest observatory this winter, the Myer-Womble observatory atop Mount Evans, Colo., (west of Denver). According to WIRED magazine, "Sometime after October, no one knows exactly when, violent winds over Colorado’s Front Range blew the 15-year-old observatory’s dome to pieces."
I had blogged about two wind storms in particular, one of which probably did the damage:
- 123-MPH Winds at Steamboat Springs, Colo. Dec. 1, 2011- Pinecliff, Colo., Gusts Over 100 MPH Dec. 30, 2011
Pulling the data for the nearest weather station (Loveland Pass - upper right-hand corner of map at bottom; there aren't many stations transmitting wind data nearby):
Loveland Pass didn't appear to be affected by the storm at the beginning of the month, but suffered six days with gusts over 30 mph, culminating in a 78.5 mph gust on the morning of Dec. 29. Given that the observatory was 3,000 feet higher, winds there could have easily been over 100 mph, and it may have been the week of unrelenting gusts that eventually crushed the dome.
A meteorologist at the University Center for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder was quoted in the article saying a storm in "early January" when winds "gusted over 80 mph in the city" probably did it -- this is the same storm that I suspected, and here's a map of nearby wind gusts on Dec. 31:
There is another possibility -- an event with 115-mph wind gusts in the state on Nov. 15, 2011, which I did not blog about, but Scott at CIMSS did.
Loveland Pass gusted to 84 mph with this event, and nearby gusts were higher than the end-of-year event, so I think this could have been the one that did the initial damage -- and maybe that late December storm caused more.
