Bomb Cyclone Drops Some Bomb Waves

(March 2020) … Before anyone gets excited. this already happened. A Bomb cyclone is a meteorological term that was coined in the late fifties and came into the mainstream in the eighties. Also known as bombogenesis. Only recently, thanks to the sensationalizing of everything by the media fueled by social media, has it been pushed into the mainstream. Kind of like the above title I used, it is an eye catcher.

Bombogenesis is when a storm’s barometric pressure drops by 24 millibars. A millibar is how pressure is measured. “One thousandth of a bar, the cgs unit of atmospheric pressure equivalent to 100 pascals”.
“A Pascal is the SI unit of pressure, equal to one newton per square meter (approximately 0.000145 pounds per square inch, or 9.9 × 10-6 atmospheres).”
Basically Bombogenesis sounds cooler than saying all of that, and one word describes and entire situation. So when nature is dropping a bomb off the east coast, the surfers get ready, and I grab my camera.

This bombogenesis went off over Friday night into the early Saturday morning on March 6th. Waves on Saturday were big but not like Sunday. Saturday was mostly flooded beaches to the dune line at high tide. The wind wasn’t right, that changed on Sunday.
We hit the beach for the clean up Sunday morning at southside beach at the Indian River Inlet and on to 3Rs. You could hear the waves crashing in the parking lot, Booooooom!

First thing I grabbed was the camera, then my trash bucket. I usually leave the camera in the car during a clean up. I wanted a picture of a big wave curling in with a tube. I was not disappointed. I could have stood there all day watching these waves. They were incredible. Normally we have to have noreaster conditions or a bad storm for these big waves. Yesterday was just a mild wind and the sun was out. The offshore storm surge was pushing in and it was epic.

The most surfers started gathering around the early afternoon. Earlier in the morning there were a few guys around, but unless you were getting towed in, these waves would crush anyone. There are a few people in this area that can surf those waves. They were somewhere else on Delmarva catching giant tubes. I did see a few folks trying to surf fish, not an easy task when the undertow is pulling like a freight train, but hey you gotta try.