Grasshoppers and beetles fly at different elevations.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: When operators at the National Weather Service Office in Norman, Oklahoma, checked the radar readings over Texas on Wednesday, they initially thought they were observing signs of rain clouds over the northwestern region of Texas.
However, it turned out the forecast wasn’t for rain, it was for bugs — the clouds that showed up on the radar weren’t rainclouds; they were a massive swarm of insects. Grasshoppers and beetles were flying between the ground and 2,500 feet, covering an area of about 50 miles.
“We didn’t have any clouds yesterday to form anything like that,” Jonathan Kurtz, a meteorologist at the Norman Forecast Office, told CNN “Our first indication was some kind of biological feature.”
Anyone in the region would have spotted bugs flying around them but, looking to the sky, would not have seen a swarm of biblical proportions since the insects were all flying at different elevations.
“It doesn’t take a whole lot of bugs to cause that on radar,” Kurtz said. “It’s not like biblical proportions. There was just enough out there that the radar picked it up.”
NWS observations program leader Forrest Mitchell informed Business Insider that the swarm covered more than 50 miles, but it’s difficult to determine how many insects were in the area.
Meanwhile, in Sabula, Iowa, thousands of mayflies completely blanketed the Savanna-Sabula Bridge and any cars in the vicinity. The deluge of buzzing, writhing insects was so intense a snowplow had to be called in to clear the roadways.