Above: a microburst, and not a tornado

They're "matchsticks cracking," a "deafening roar"; they make their victims feel "surrounded by whiteness"; they're a "sudden roar like an express train" and, again, a "freight train tearing through [one's] yard"; above all else, they're "a big push of power." They're microbursts, and residents are usually too shaken up to know how to describe them when reporters arrive on-scene, as quoted above in Republican articles over the last decade. Nonetheless, we had a microburst in Whately on Saturday that may have had a small tornado "embedded" in it, which is enough to make any reporter or TV news crew convulse with journalistic euphoria.

But what is a microburst? We took a look in the Republican archives - over 30 stories across 15 years of reporting on, defining, and describing microbursts and their effects, dating back to November, 1993 - for answers. Below, we rank the most common scientific definitions of microbursts that came up in articles:

So, okay, a microburst is most likely to be "a downburst of violent winds." However, "mini-tornado," the last description in the list above, is interesting. One could indeed think of microbursts as a tornado's younger, estranged brother, or a reverse tornado, or a giant wind bomb dropped from above, or God blowing down gales of condemnation on the infidels. Microbursts are often mistaken, initially, as tornadoes for their intense wind and the damage they cause, until the weather experts are called in to "investigate" whether or not an intense gust of wind was a tornado or a microburst. The two are actually pretty different, and a microburst isn't even categorized as a type of tornado - microbursts don't spin.

Tornadoes, obviously, get most of the media attention in our weather reportage - they're tall, gaudy, noisy, they stumble around and break things as if they were inebriated, they spin and sling roof panels and cows around and such. According to the National Climactic Data Center, which has online records of storms dating back to 1950, there have been 23 tornadoes in Franklin County, 15 in Hampden, and 8 in Hampshire over the last 58 years.

Microbursts, however, are shorter, quicker and much more compressed. Microbursts form when heavy rains collide with and evaporate into dry air. That rain quickly cools the air; that cooled air, in turn, amasses weight, forms into a large cold, Steve-Austin-like fist of heavier air, then plummets through the warmer, lighter air and into the ground (according, not directly in those words, to a 1994 Union-News article). So, basically, the air drops a huge, single punch to the ground - rather than meandering through it. The wind from the microburst then expands outward once it hits land, and screws you over that way.

The parameters of a microburst are as such: if the area of damage is within a 4 kilometer diameter, it's a microburst. Beyond 4 kilometers, it's a macroburst.

What's more, the microburst is much younger than a tornado, celebrating but its 33rd birthday on June 24. The late meteorologist Tetsuya "Ted" Fujita discovered and coined the term "microburst" when researching the cause of the Eastern Airlines Flight 66 crash in 1975; that airliner was essentially hurled down to the ground amidst intense thunderstorm winds, killing 109 passengers and 6 crew members [these numbers vary according to where you look]. Fujita's 1998 obit offers a brief history of the little wind-category disaster that could:

So, what do tornadoes and microbursts have in common? They cause such man-on-the-street interview exclamations as: "This is pretty bad," and "I was in the living room and was looking out the picture window and saw the rain coming sideways [...] "I said, 'Uh oh!'"; as well as the headlines: "It's official: Strong tornado ravaged Wendell" in July 2006, and "Weather Service: Storm was really tornado" in Northampton, on July 4th, 2000.

In fact, many local microburst / tornado stories occur within days of July 4th. Like fireworks, microbursts and tornadoes are immense, kind-of mesmerizing things to look at. Most of them occur in America, and are morbidly awesome unless they are destroying your home. To that end, below is a tornado that is not happening to you: