Turning the Clocks Back to Hurricane Agnes (credit: This Day in Weather History)

DISCUSSION:  As we look back to June 14th - 25th, 1972, a tropical depression formed over the Yucatan Peninsula on the 14th and moved eastward into the northwest Caribbean Sea. The system strengthened into a tropical storm during the night of the 15th, and a hurricane on the 18th as it moved northward in the Gulf of Mexico. Moving to the Florida panhandle as a hurricane, the system quickly weakened into a tropical depression as it moved through Georgia on the 20th.  As history would play out, this system (upon landfall) wreaked major havoc along the East Coast of the United States in the form of a heavy, long-duration rainfall event.  Even despite the increase in the large-scale remote sensing capability at the time, the more primitive nature of the larger-scale forecast models being used at the time limited the effectiveness of forecaster accuracy prior to the onset of this heavy rainfall event generated by the landfall of Hurricane Agnes.  To learn more about this particular tropical cyclone-based event, click on the following link!

To learn more about other past historic weather events from around the world, be sure to click here!

©2017 Meteorologist Jordan Rabinowitz