00:00Our last cold front in the northeast produced sites like this in Connecticut.
00:04Strong winds, heavy rainfall, and yeah, caught a couple people maybe by surprise as how gusty those winds could be.
00:13But those winds became fairly intense as they moved across not only Connecticut, but then into Rhode Island and eventually into Massachusetts as well.
00:22And that's where we found a couple of storm reports.
00:25Interestingly enough, you'll notice here near New Bedford, we have a cluster of storm reports, damaging straight line winds.
00:32The National Weather Service in Boston actually went out to assess these winds, and they determined it was a gust NATO.
00:38Sounds like a crazy idea, right?
00:41Gust NATO, what exactly is that?
00:43Well, it is different than a tornado, but it kind of does obviously have the gust part with the NATO part, so you might be thinking tornado.
00:50A tornado versus a gust NATO.
00:52Here's the difference.
00:53Tornadoes, we know there's an environment for these storms, particularly up in the sky, aloft, for them to lower and produce that powerful circular rotation.
01:04Gust Tornadoes also have a circular rotation, but a little bit different.
01:07They're driven by the ground upward, much like, for example, dust devils or little eddies that you can see leaves swirl around in, right?
01:17So that's actually driven by the ground up.
01:19Sometimes that is often when we talk about the difference between the infield and the outfield of a ball field and how they heat up at different rates.
01:27Well, gust NATOs, they can actually occur on gust fronts.
01:31So this is where that clash of cool air comes in with the warmer air, and right near the surface of a ground, it can really cause those winds to lift.
01:38And once you get that lifting mechanism and that circulation, that's where we're able to get that gust NATO, much like we saw with this last cold front.
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