Wild Weather Around The World – Indonesia, St. Vincent, and Kenya

14 Apr 2021, 6:00 pm

Spring has finally sprung here in the U.S. bringing with it severe storms and even late season snowstorms, but what’s been happening around the world?

We start in the southern hemisphere where tropical cyclone Seroja battered Indonesia leaving at least 128 people dead and thousands more displaced. That same storm would go on the batter Western Australia as well with strong winds and flooding.

On the island nation of St. Vincent, ash rained down as the La Soufriere volcano erupted for the first time in nearly 42 years forcing the evacuation of many residents, but it wasn’t just in the Caribbean, Ecuador’s Sangay volcano spewed smoke and ash into the skies as well shutting down a local airport.

Heading to Europe next, where a major cold snap dumped more than half a foot of snow in several countries. While they stayed indoors, the folks in Sochi, Russia welcomed the cold for their annual BoogelWoogel carnival.

And it was a happy ending for 9 critically endangered giraffes were rescued from a flooded island in Kenya. Crews worked to move the giraffes to a new 44-hundred-acre sanctuary on the mainland.

About the author

Meredith Garofalo

Meredith is a Certified Broadcast Meteorologist as designated by the American Meteorological Society. She was born and raised in Cleveland but has worked from coast to coast covering almost every type of weather. Meredith is a weather, space, and STEM journalist and has been live out in the field during destructive tropical storms on the Gulf Coast of Florida, raging wildfires in Southern Cali... Load Morefornia, and covered the wreckage from tornadoes in the Great Plains. In 2009, she reported on the damaging hail storm during the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally and in 2017, the historic California winter storms that produced record rain totals and devastating flash flooding. Prior to joining WeatherNation, Meredith worked at KEYT/KKFX in Santa Barbara, CA, KOTA-TV in Rapid City, SD, WWSB-TV in Sarasota, FL, and began her career as an intern at WGN-TV in Chicago. She was Santa Barbara's "Favorite Weathercaster of the Year" in 2016 and the Community Partner of the Year in 2017 for her volunteer work with Make-A-Wish Tri-Counties and awarded with the 2018 Valparaiso University Alumni Association First Decade Achievement Award. Meredith is the current chair of the American Meteorological Society's Station Scientist Committee, which focuses on raising greater awareness & outreach when it comes to science education for viewers. She's also an accomplished journalist, producing weather and science stories including rocket launches at Vandenberg Air Force Base and the new GOES-16 satellite and it's impacts on weather forecasting. Meredith was personally invited by NASA's Johnson Space Center to interview astronauts on the International Space Station and was the only meteorologist in the nation to do an exclusive report accompanying the GOES-West satellite from Colorado to Florida, reporting on and covering it's launch in 2018. Meredith's also worked on features that took her paragliding along the coast, white water rafting in Northern California, learning to surf in the Pacific Ocean, and how to be an aerial photographer while flying a single engine plane! Say hi on Facebook, Twitter, & LinkedIn!