Hector forming over the Tiwi Islands — seen from Gunn Point, Northern Territory, Australia
His name is Hector. It is a very peculiar storm, with its unique punctuality — and one of the strangest occurrences in life.
Typically, meteorologists only give names to weather systems that threaten to have significant impacts over a large area — like the hurricanes we’ve been hearing about (and feeling the effects of) in recent years.
But “Hector the Convector“, or Heitor, as we decided to call him at ZAP, is an exception: it is a simple thunderstorm, which earned the right to its own name not for its destructive power, but for its reliability and consistency.
This meteorological phenomenon is formed on ilhas Tiwioff the coast of Darwin, in northern Australia, so So reliable you can set your watch for him.
Almost every afternoon, precisely at 3pmduring the rainy seasons — from September to March — Heitor appears and shows up, says the climatologist Ceri Perkins in an article on .
Its clock-like consistency is the result of a local microclimatecreated by sea breezes and the pyramid-shaped topography of the Tiwi Islands.
These islands are surrounded by tropical marine air. In the morning sun, the dry air over the land heats up faster than moist air over the sea. As the dry air heats up, expands, creating a low-pressure pocket over the islands that sucks sea air ashore in the form of afternoon sea breezes.
NASA
Photograph of the Tiwi Islands, off the coast of Darwin, Australia, captured by an International Space Station Expedition 52 astronaut
These sea breezes arrive from all sides. When they converge on the peaks, They have nowhere to go but upcarrying moisture from the seas with it.
As the air column rises, cools and condensesforms water droplets and clouds, and injects instability into the atmospherewhich quickly turns into a deep convective storm. Hence its native name: Hector, the Convetor.
This name was given to him given by World War II pilotswho used their huge cloud cumulonimbus like a navigation beacon when flying between Darwin and Papua New Guinea.
According to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Hector is one of the most most consistently large on the planetregularly reaching a height of more than 19 thousand meters — and occasionally reaching the stratosphere.
It is also one of the best studied. Thunderstorms typically tend to be unpredictable and short-lived animalsit is difficult to know exactly where they will appear.
But since the 1980s, scientists have explored Hector’s extraordinary reliability to probe the mechanisms of storm formation and investigate phenomena such as lightning and updrafts.
And also to set your clocks.
