Bratislava was hit by an extremely strong storm in the evening hours of Sunday, June 21. Meteorologists talked about the so-called downburst phenomenon. It is a meteorological phenomenon in which there is an intense and violent fall of cold air from the storm cloud towards the ground.
When this air hits the Earth’s surface, it will spread in all directions and create an extremely strong, destructive wind. It often resembles a tornado in its strength and consequences, but it has a completely different structure.
Storms often bring with them phenomena that can cause enormous damage in a matter of minutes. One of the most dangerous and visually stunning phenomena is the so-called downburst. Although people often mistake it for a tornado after the front passes because of the broken trees and torn off roofs, it is a completely different meteorological phenomenon with different mechanics of destruction.
In simple terms, a downburst can be described as an intense and violent fall of cold air from a storm cloud directly towards the ground. This phenomenon occurs in the upper layers of the storm, where there is a huge amount of ice, hail and supercooled water. When this precipitation begins to fall and enters the drier air below the cloud, it evaporates rapidly. Evaporation cools the air around precipitation extremely, and since cold air is heavier than warm air, this gigantic mass will begin to literally fall to the ground under the influence of gravity at a tremendous speed.
The moment when the downburst hits the earth’s surface resembles a huge collapse. After the impact, the air does not start to twist like in the case of a tornado, but it spreads with immense ferocity in all directions. This creates a destructive, straight-line wind that deposits debris and trees in the affected area in one direction – in the line of the wind. The hallmark of a downburst on weather radar and photographs is a massive, dark wall of rain that looks like a giant bucket of water has been dumped from the cloud onto the ground.
Shortly after this dangerous phenomenon swept through Bratislava, authetic shots of the trigger during and after the downburst began to appear on social networks. The singer Patrícia Vittek went to the city.
In the first video, the former partner of footballer Róbert Vittek captured almost black clouds that were already breaking and hiding the pale blue to yellow sky behind them. “Tornado? Or what was that?” she wrote along with other shots from the car.
She then showed a photo directly from the streets of the city. There were broken trees on the ground and standing water on the street. It looked similar on the roads, where there were large puddles of water and the sidewalks lining the banks of the Danube were full of broken branches.
Miriam Kalisová, the former presenter of Televízny Novín on Markíza, published even scarier images. who lives in a two-story houseboat on the banks of the Danube. She posted an ominous VIDEO on social media as a storm raged directly above them.
“And it won’t rain and it won’t rain. Our house was shaking a little,” she wrote. The footage showed an extremely heavy downpour hitting the surface of the Danube. You can find the VIDEO above the article.
