Local residents observe damages after a powerful overnight storm in Falls Church, Va., June 30, 2012.
Weather-related events produced plenty of buzzwords this year, from a supermoon in May to a superstorm in October. A particularly memorable term to suddenly invade our lexicons was derecho (pronounced deh-REH-choh). A derecho is a powerful windstorm that can blow gusts up to 130 mph. At the end of June, a derecho swept from Chicago to the Atlantic Ocean amid thunder and rain, leaving millions of people without power during a summer heat wave. The word means direct in Spanish, a reference to the straight lines of wind damage the storms leave behind; according to the government’s Storm Prediction Center, the physics professor who coined the term in 1888 chose derecho to complement tornado, which he associated with the Spanish word for to turn.