Perfect storm

From Free net encyclopedia

A perfect storm is any only-remotely-possible disasterous confluence of singly innocuous events. In such a situation, it is clear that if any one element had been displaced in time or space the result would have been far less powerful, but because just the right things were in the mix and with just the right timing, the situation ballooned.

Compare with butterfly effect.

Meteorological event

The phrase the perfect storm is also associated with the 1991 Halloween Nor’easter, a particular meteorological event of October 1991 wherein a powerful weather system had gathered force, ravaging the Atlantic Ocean over the course of several days and causing the deaths of several Massachusetts-based fisherman and billions of dollars of damage. In that case, the merging of two low-pressure areas (areas associated with storms), a large flow of warm air from the south, cold air from the north, and moisture feeding into the storm from the warm ocean current (the Gulf stream) all conflated with exceptionally strong northwesterly winds (cold air), and strong Northeasterly winds (warm air that moved up from the south spinning counter clockwise in typical low pressure behavior) to create an exceptionally strong storm across a very large area. Had the storm been more concentrated, it might have looked more like a hurricane. Without typical hurricane warnings, fisherman and smaller vessels at sea were caught in hurricane-like conditions.

The term is also used to describe a hypothetical hurricane that happens to hit the most vulnerable spot of a given region, at the highest possible intensity, and at the worst possible time and thus creates the worst possible damage.

See also

  • The Perfect Storm, a book (1997) and a feature film (2000) based on the October 1991 storm.


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