Maybe this is some sort of Canadian slang, but wtf does this mean? Wtf is a Pineapple Express, and why is it slamming into anything…?
“When a pineapple express slammed into southwest B.C. in mid-November that year, the Coldwater River, swollen with rainwater and snowmelt, pushed through the city’s dikes like an ocean wave washing away a sandcastle.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pineapple_Express
I wasn’t familiar with it either (well, not in this context) but apparently it’s a term for an atmospheric river.
Thanks for the context, comrade!
Tangent -
I really dislike when journalists use weird terms/colloquialisms for stuff that just make no sense in context, even if that colloquialism is decently common. If they had said “atmospheric river, also known as Pineapple Express”, I’d have looked it up, but it wouldn’t have been -necessary- to do so because, well, it would have made contextual sense…
It’s just bad science communication.
Ok I’m done. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.
This was the term we were using locally since I was a kid, recently everyone’s been making an effort to refer to the phenomenon by the meteorological name, atmospheric river, but Pineapple Express is still pretty embedded with a lot of people that have been hearing and using it for 20+ years.
For the locals, the original term actually conveys the meaning better because the new term, while more widely known worldwide, is not as widely known locally.
