Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal

The Wild Wild Science Journal is now part of the new AGU Blogosphere!

I have some very smart and fascinating company- please check it out!

Devin Bowling took this shot (in Albertville, Al.) of a wall cloud (upper left). A tail cloud is the center, pointing toward the rain. Tail clouds are often mistaken for tornadoes.

As forecasters expected, violent storms tracked across Alabama and Tennessee on Tuesday. Tornadoes then hit South Carolina in the early morning hours of Wednesday. I was on air for nearly 8 hours straight. My voice is yet to recover.

Wall clouds are the parent clouds of a tornado. Not every wall cloud will produce a twister but if you see one, go the other way. Fast. Better yet, get under something sturdy. DO NOT head for a nearby overpass. Winds are accelerated under them and taking shelter under one can be a deadly mistake.

On the Great Lakes, it was the second strongest storm on record. Winds gusted to 80 mph. The waves on Lake Superior reached 9 meters!! (For the metrically challenged that’s over 26 feet!!)

The pressure at the center of the storm dropped to 955.2 millibars. That’s the lowest pressure ever recorded in Minnesota. Only the storm of January 1978 was stronger.

The 1978 storm is referred to as the great Ohio Blizzard. The pressure dropped to an incredible 950 millibars in that storm. Almost everyone older than 35 in Ohio can tell you stories of that event.

The Great Lakes Storm on Tuesday. It passed over Duluth and now holds the record for the lowest pressure ever recorded in Minnesota. Image courtesy NWS Duluth.

The storm in 5th place is rather famous. On November 10, 1975, (thirty-five years ago next month) a surprise storm produced a low pressure of 980 millibars. That storm hit Lake Superior hard and resulted in the sinking of an iron ore carrier called the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Canadian Gordon Lightfoot made the gale famous by his song about the doomed freighter. One line in particular has stayed with me.

“Does anyone know where the love of God goes, when the waves turn the minutes to hours.”

Update Oct. 29,2010: It now appears that the Minnesota storm missed the the non tropical storm record for the mainland U.S. by 0.01 inches of mercury!

Numerical weather prediction model forecast valid at 8 PM U.S. East Coast time Tuesday. This storm will spread tornadoes across the U.S. Midwest and near hurricane force winds on the Great Lakes.

When most folks think of tornadoes they imagine a warm spring afternoon suddenly turning stormy. More often than not this is true but there are glaring exceptions. Last night was one and Tuesday will be another.

A powerful storm system has been winding up  in the Plains. Last night a band of storms from Texas to Alabama brought tornadoes and large hail. Here in North Alabama, I was up for much of the night watching radar.

Winds going toward the radar right next to winds going away from the radar. This is what a tornado looks like on a Doppler radar. Image from Penn. State NEXRAD Archive. Click for larger version.

Large super-cell tornadoes are the easiest to spot and we had only one of those up in Tennessee. The ones you have to really watch for are the smaller more short lived twisters that are embedded in a squall line.

Around 4 AM CDT Monday morning, the Doppler radars indicated a strong circulation in the line over NE Alabama. The little town of Ider, near Fort Payne, was struck with a twister around 4:15.

The tornado looks to be an EF-1 or perhaps briefly an EF-2. An EF-1 tornado has winds of 32-50 meters per second (73-113 mph). That’s the equivalent of up to a category two hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale.

The Storm Prediction Center  (SPC) in Norman Oklahoma issues the tornado watches for all of the U.S. They’ve notified Meteorologists like myself and at the local NWS forecast offices that they believe there is a rare “high risk” of tornadoes over Indiana and Ohio on Tuesday. A high risk is rare anytime.

It’s exceedingly rare in autumn.

SPC does only one thing. Forecast severe weather. Meteorologists like myself give high credibility to their forecasts.

The Enhanced Fujita Scale- courtesy of the Storm Prediction Center (NOAA)

There’s been  an amazing technological revolution in forecasting over the last 30 years. In the 1970′s most tornado watches had no reports of tornadoes. Now it is rare for a watch not to verify.

When I was an undergrad meteorology student, I worked on a project at Okla. University in 1980 called SESAME. That stands for Severe Environmental Storms and Mesoscale Experiment. It was a fancy name for trying to correlate what severe storms were doing with what the new Doppler radars were indicating.

I remember being laughed at by people who called it a waste of money. It was anything but.

Doppler radars cover most of the nation now and make it possible for forecasters to give incredibly accurate warnings. An accuaracy I could not have imagined back in 1980.

At 4:15am Monday, the Doppler radar here in North Alabama showed a srong rotation and a tornado warning was issued. We had it on the air in less than 15 seconds from the time the NWS pushed the button. Unfortunately, most people in the little town of Ider were asleep.

The ones who has NOAA weather radios were awake because a loud alarm had gone off. If you live in area where severe weather is likely, you should have one. They only cost about 30$.

It might save your life one night.

You cannot imagine how frustrating it is to break into programming and give a warning while knowing that most people are asleep and will never hear it.

Until it’s too late that is.

Be safe,

Dan

There is a paper in NATURE this week that has caught the attention of a lot of people. Even those who are not into astrophysics!

Awhile back the Hubble telescope took the image you see below. See that little smudge?

This image may contain the most distant and oldest object ever seen by human eyes. From European Southern Observatory/NASA

Astronomer Matt Lehnert from the Observatoire de Paris and a team of scientists decided to use the new Very Large Array(VLT) telescope in Chile to see of they could capture enough light from that smudge to measure the red shift.

The VLT in Northern Chile's Atacama Desert.

Remember that the farther an object is away from Earth the faster it is moving away from us. The entire universe is expanding.

Think of all the galaxies we can see including our own on the skin of a balloon that is slowly being blown up. They are all getting further apart. The farther away an object is the faster it is moving away from us.

Astronomers can measure the shift in the frequency of light to see how fast an object is receding from us. They can then use this to estimate the distance it is from us.

Matt Lehnert and his team were able to do it and were stunned to see a redshift of 8.6. That means that little smudge is 13.1 billion light years away! That means of course that we are seeing the galaxy as it was 13.1 billion years ago. The Earth itself is only 4,500 million years old!

From Marcelo Alvarez's cool page: http://www.cita.utoronto.ca/~malvarez/index.shtml

Think about that. You are seeing something as it was 13 billion years ago. You are literally looking back in time.

The universe was only about 600 million years old then. This is just after what is called the dark ages. The universe was not visible after the big bang until it had cooled enough for photons to from and travel.

Marcel Alvarez is a Canadian astrophysicist and he has a great poster that explains the very wild early universe! Click the image to the right to get the BIG picture.

Found this online today and it’s a must for Earth Science teachers everywhere. This is definitely my longest post ever!

Okay so click on it and download the full size image and then get a poster made!

kudos to Karl Tate at OurAmazingPlanet.com