The National Weather Service has a warning for southern Oregon: bombogenesis is coming!

What the heck is that? If you’re looking at the word and, along with the context, you’re guessing it’s the formation of some kind of weather bomb, give yourself a pat on the back.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration defines bombogenesis as “a midlatitude cyclone that rapidly intensifies, dropping at least 24 millibars over 24 hours. A millibar measures atmospheric pressure. This can happen when a cold air mass collides with a warm air mass, such as air over warm ocean waters.”

Atmospheric pressure drops when air near the Earth’s surface rises “faster than it can be replaced at the bottom.”

When the fall in atmospheric pressure is sudden, the result is often called a “bomb cyclone” because the drop typically creates violent weather that arrives like a bomb going off. Some meteorologists use the term “explosive cyclogenesis” to describe the storm’s formation.

Good advice from the National Weather Service's Medford office. (National Weather Service)

Bombogenesis, explosive cyclogenesis: whatever you call it, you should know it can bring “hurricane-force winds” and all that that suggests: downed trees, buckets of rain, suddenly roofless houses, impassable roads.

Thanks to the expected arrival of a bomb cyclone, southern Oregon is under a winter-storm warning and a high-wind warning, starting Tuesday afternoon and lasting until sometime Wednesday.

“Please reconsider your travel plans for Tuesday,” the National Weather Service’s Medford forecast office advised Monday.

Now that we understand what bombogenesis means, we know good advice when we hear it from meteorologists.

More on Oregon weather: High winds, ‘potentially historic’ storm could make Thanksgiving travel very dangerous.

-- Douglas Perry

@douglasmperry

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