Everybody knows it’s good luck when a ladybug lands on your hand. No one would feel good if hundreds of thousands of the polka-dotted insects landed on them. And if you turned on the news and heard about a massive swarm of insects heading for your town, you’d jump in your car and drive to either a church or a volcano. That’s exactly what happened this week in California; ladybugs all flew south together in such large numbers they showed up on radar like a storm.
The large echo showing up on SoCal radar this evening is not precipitation, but actually a cloud of lady bugs termed a “bloom” #CAwx pic.twitter.com/1C0rt0in6z
— NWS San Diego (@NWSSanDiego) June 5, 2019
The LA Times reported that this week the National Weather Service’s radar for San Diego picked up on something that looked like a a lot like a regular storm rolling through the southern part of the state, but was in actuality a giant swarm of ladybugs. Just how big? Uh, we’re no meteorologists (but we are big babies), so we’d describe it as “end of days big.” From the story:
“Joe Dandrea, a meteorologist with NWS San Diego, said from the radar, the ladybug bloom appears to be about 80 miles by 80 miles, but the ladybugs aren’t in a concentrated mass that size. Rather, they’re spread throughout the sky, flying at between 5,000 and 9,000 feet, with the most concentrated mass about 10 miles wide.”
Oh! Only a ten-mile wide concentration at the swarm’s densest section. And here we thought we needed to start making sacrifices to all the gods when all we have to do is hide in a fallout shelter.
The @NWSSanDiego reports that the large echo showing up on radar in Southern California last night was actually a cloud of ladybugs about 80 miles by 80 miles in size flying at between 5,000 and 9,000 feet: https://t.co/0tZQryBR1v pic.twitter.com/qiMKcDd3Pe
— Shah Selbe (@shahselbe) June 5, 2019
The good news is that anyone who looked skyward as the ladybugs made their trip south didn’t see a storm the way the radar showed, but rather thousands of little specks flying, which is unsettling but a lot less terrifying.
That is unless you were nearby when they all landed. That would be really unlucky.
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