Battle of the Epic Whirlwinds: Hurricane Vs. Tornado

Versus

In the Free State of South Africa, 2012 was a year marked by an outbreak of severe thunderstorms. This province lies quite far inland of the subcontinent, to the northeast of Cape Town and to the west of the Drakensberg; the magnificent mountain chain that borders the eastern coastline of South Africa. These severe thunderstorms caused quite a bit of grief for the inhabitants of the Free State, levelling 55 houses and hospitalising 5 people, according to All Africa online publication. But in addition to the heavy rains, lightning and wind damage, these thunderstorms had the ill-grace to drop a couple of tornadoes too!

To put things into perspective, South Africa is not a country known for tornadoes. If you’re thinking of tornadoes, your imaginative context is probably located in the aptly named ‘Tornado Alley’ in the mid-western states of America. Now, as someone who has a degree in atmospheric science, you can imagine how many questions I was fielding from people who had heard about the severe weather events I just mentioned. Not questions as such: statements rather. People rarely ask me questions about the weather. I think they’re afraid of the answers. I can handle that… but what I couldn’t handle was the fact that people were confusing hurricanes with tornadoes!

“Did you hear about the hurricanes in the Free State?”

To anyone in atmospheric, Earth, ocean or any related sciences – regardless of your specialization – confusing tornadoes with hurricanes is like confusing your grandmother with Megan Fox. It’s like confusing an elephant with a pineapple. The concept of a hurricane tearing across the Free State is about as alien to the weather educated as a giraffe cavorting around the North Pole. Wearing snow shoes.

But, before you cringe at the memory of you making this rather Herculean error, one must take into account that the majority of you out there aren’t weather educated. That’s perfectly all right! We’re going to change that right now. Hurricanes and tornadoes: what’s the difference? Moreover, what’s the big deal if you get them confused? Well, when it comes to these two somewhat (ok, VERY) tempestuous weather phenomena, size really, really, REALLY…

… really, REALLY, really, REALLY, REEEEEEEEALLY does count.

Hurricanes: Kicking Ass and Taking Names

Satellites captured this fairly terrifying image of Hurricane Fran hurtling towards North Carolina on the 5^th September 1996. “Fran” caused so much trouble that they decided to NEVER call another hurricane “Fran” again. 

FYI, hurricanes are named alphabetically according to their order of development during the hurricane season. The first to appear will be named something beginning with an ‘A’, the second ‘B’ and so on and so forth. Hurricane Fran was therefore the 6^th fully fledged tropical cyclone to develop that season and one whose limelight was solidly claimed in 2005 by Katrina and again in 2012 by Sandy. Those bitches!

Hurricanes are large tropical storms born over the equator. Fed by prodigious updrafts of hot, moist, sexy air, these giant swirling monsters generate, via condensation alone, 200 times the electrical generating capacity of the entire freaking planet, according to the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory. For those of you who like numbers or are easily impressed by them, this equates to 600,000,000,000,000 Watts. This is not even to mention the amount of energy generated by hurricane winds, which is an additional 1,500,000,000,000 Watts of unbridled weather rage!

I don’t even know what that number is… a billion million? A trillion zillion billon million?

Ooh! Aah! Hurricane Statistics

• Damage: Should they make landfall, hurricanes can cause tens of billions of dollars’ worth of damage. Katrina was only a category 3 storm when it had its fender-bender with the Mississippi Gulf Coast. And yet its damage was estimated at $81,000,000,000!

• Storm Diameter: Hurricanes are huge systems with an average diameter of 800 km (500 mi), although Hurricane Carla, which raged into the Texas coast in 1961, was an especially big girl at 1280 km (800 mi) across.

• Wind speeds: Hurricanes are wrathful systems with category 5 storms (you do not get larger) generating winds of over 250 km/hr or 156 mi/hr.

• Associated Severe Weather: Hurricanes are social creatures. They have loads of friends they like to bring to the party they tend to gatecrash. These include torrential rainfall, thunderstorms, lightning, hail and storm surges, which is an increase in average sea level that can be in excess of 5 meters or 19 feet! To add insult to grave injury, hurricanes can even generate tornadoes.

• Weakness: For all their size, energy and capacity for total annihilation, these tropical super storms cannot survive over land. They require a tireless volume of hot, moist air – as is found over the equatorial oceanic regions – in order to preserve storm motion and momentum. That dry continental air just won’t do. Plus, all the friction and turbulence caused by onshore topography (mountains and such) tend to break up the party pretty quickly.

Tornadoes

“Cow…

‘Nother Cow!”

“Actually I think that was the same one”

– ‘Twister’, 1996

I regard tornadoes the same way a sadomasochist regards nipple clamps: they’re deliciously terrifying. Having said this, my opinion is fantastically unfounded because I have never, ever witnessed or had my house relocated by a tornado. If I had, I would probably drop the enthusiasm a notch.

 A Kansas tornado tears across a country roooooad, take me hooooome.

A tornado is a raging column of rotating air that extends from the ground to the base of its parent cumulonimbus cloud, “Cumulonimbus” being the longest and fanciest word everyone remembers from High school geography. I know this because every time I tell someone I have a background in weather, they say, “Oh! So you, like, studied cumulonimbus clouds!”

Yeah, something like that buddy.

Tornadoes are generated by severe thunderstorms in atmospheric environments full of wind shear and abundant lower level moisture, amongst other ingredients. Next time you’re in the bath or swimming pool, make your hand flat, put it in the water and paddle. You’ll notice tiny little vortices or whirlpools that spin off in either direction.

“Wind shear” really just refers to two masses of air moving at different speeds and/or different directions to each other. And, just like your hand in the pool, shear in the atmosphere generates the same kind of ‘whirlpools’ in the air, although you can’t see them because air is invisible. What happens next in tornado genesis is a powerful updraft of air, which pushes these horizontal columns of rotating air vertical. And this is when shit starts getting real.

A gorgeous supercell thunderstorm at sunset. This cloud formation, known as a “mesocyclone” to academics and a “mothership” to nerds, is the atmospheric platforms from which tornadoes are commonly spawned.

Ooh! Aah! Tornado Statistics

• Damage: It just takes one tornado straying into a heavily built up area to rack up damage totals that would bankrupt an entire country. In May of 2011, a single tornado tore through Joplin in Missouri – a city of 50,000 inhabitants. The reports that emerged at the time estimated the damage of insured property alone to be in the region of $3,000,000,000 (billion), and all from a single tornado. This doesn’t even take into account the uninsured losses suffered.

On the brighter side – Tornado, 1: Insurance companies, 0.

• Wind Speeds: Tornadoes are violent creatures. The wind speeds that tear around the funnel, more specifically, of F5 tornadoes, have been clocked in at over 500 km/hr or 315 mi/hr. This is more than half the cruising speed of a commercial airliner.

• Associated Severe Weather: Like hurricanes, tornadoes are social. You will generally find them hanging out with lightning, torrential rain, giant hailstones, wind (duh) and the occasional cow or 18-wheeler semi-trailer.

• Lifespan: For all their fury, tornadoes are relatively short-lived with the longest ‘twister’ on record having raged on for 3.5 hours. This suspected F5 tornado, dubbed the Tri-State Tornado, tore through 350 km (220 mi) of Illinois, Missouri and Indiana on the 18^th March in 1925, leaving almost 700 people dead in its wake.

While hurricanes may boast more impressive size statistics than a single tornado, one should note that the kinds of thunderstorms that generate tornadoes are rarely isolated and often travel in waves with one thunderstorm cell feeding the formation of several others. In 2011, in fact, the National Severe Storm Laboratory recorded the most prolific outbreak of tornadoes in American history! Between April 25^th and April 28^th 2011, a staggering 358 tornadoes were recorded, with the majority of them having touched down within a single 24-hour period. Thanks to a much more sophisticated weather forecasting and tornado warning system, this outbreak caused half the death toll as the single Tri-state Tornado of 1925.

Class Dismissed: Your Take-Home Message

There are many big and important differences between hurricanes and tornadoes, most of which are related to scale: scale in size, in wind speeds, in damage done and in lifespan. Hurricanes are huge weather systems that last days and can cause widespread destruction. Tornadoes are much, much smaller weather phenomena generated by severe thunderstorms. Yet, in spite of their exponentially smaller size and shorter life spans, they can do incredible localized damage and frequently boast wind speeds greater than even a Category 5 hurricane.

So, to sum it all up and pack it in a nutshell:

Tornadoes can rearrange your back garden and perhaps relocate your house.

Hurricanes can rearrange your province and perhaps the entire eastern coastline of your country.

Tsunami!

It’s a killer club song by DVBBS & Borgeous and it’s coming to a Pacific neighbourhood near you to totally ruin your day.

Tsunami!

Tsunamis are big waves… the result of a monumental displacement of water that usually takes place at depth somewhere on the ocean floor, although they can also be caused in large lakes and by seismic events occurring at or near the Earth’s surface. The result is a colossal series of waves that only the most baked of surfers would attempt to tackle. The damage is potentially staggering should these waves make landfall and they frequently do.

Makin’ Waves: A How To Guide

As it was mentioned, tsunamis are most often caused by events that have the energy to displace enough water to give the coastlines of the adjacent continents a salt-water enema. What kind of events might these be?

• Earthquakes, the result of a sudden and violent wrenching of Earth’s foundations, can kick the water up and around its epicentre into violent protest.

• Fat celebrities jumping off their gazillion dollar luxury yachts.

• Landslides can send many tonnes of rock and debris crashing into water, generating large waves that can wipe out beaches, forests and any and all human habitation.

• Iceberg calving does the same as landslides, except, instead of earth and rock, it sends mammoth-sized chunks of ice and snow (and perhaps the occasional cryogenically preserved mammoth) careening into the ocean.

• Volcanic eruptions can do both: they can cause incredible landslides of debris into the ocean or a lake and they can cause tremors and earthquakes violent enough to generate tsunamis.

And then there are meteorite strikes that can cause the kind of giant waves portrayed in end-of-the-world movies The Day After Tomorrow and Deep Impact. Even the detonation of nuclear bombs (refer to the totes adorbs film Finding Nemo) can cause billions of litres of previously peaceful water to relocate to your previously peaceful neighbourhood.

Mother Nature Can Be A Real Jerk

You’d be forgiven for believing this image to have been grossly photo-shopped. To the best of my knowledge it hasn’t been and you can find more incredible photos of the tsunami that inundated the Japanese coastline in March 2011 here: National Geographic News 

Yes, she can. You see, tsunamis – natural disasters in their own right – are typically conceived by natural disasters. As if an earthquake wasn’t enough to rattle your nerves, here comes a solid wall of water and debris to thoroughly spoil your day. This makes them the coarse salt in the wound of the earthquake stricken city – as the Pacific coastline of Japan tragically experienced in March 2011 – and they add insult to injury to anyone who has managed to claw their way through one natural disaster only to encounter another.

Photo Credit: BBC News

Tsunami means “Harbour Wave” in Japanese and the etymology (“word origin” for the vocabulary handicapped) is brilliant…

Japanese fishermen would climb into their creaky little fishing boats and spend the day out on the swell catching fish as fishermen in fishing boats do. Without noticing anything unusual at all, they’d return to the harbour with their soon-to-be sushi only to find their entire village looking particularly soggy and sorry for itself. And so, tsunamis became known as “Harbour Waves” because they didn’t seem to happen anywhere else.

But, how had something as conspicuous as a giant wave escaped their notice? Surely, the wall of water that is a tsunami would have flung the fishermen and their creaky little fishing boats into an abyssal wave trough before crashing ashore?

The answer would be “not necessarily” and here’s why…

Tsunami Travel

Tsunamis are ocean waves, which means that they travel in a waveform and are governed by the same physical parameters and laws. They have wavelength (λ), which is the distance between the trough and the crest of the wave (refer to graph below); and amplitude (a), the distance from the ocean’s resting point to top of the crest.

If this diagram starts to disinter excruciating memories of Grade 11 trigonometry, bury the anxiety underneath the rubble of your other psychological baggage. It’s just an ocean wave. Nothing more.

In addition to having a wavelength and amplitude, ocean waves travel at a certain speed (ν) and with a certain amount of energy (E). People who study physical oceanography make use of all kinds of fancy looking equations to calculate these various parameters given one thing or another. I used to be very well-versed in these equations, since I majored in ocean and atmospheric science back at university. Since those distant book-bound days, however, an abundance of beer, travel and floozies has done its damnedest to erase my memory of these equations and replace them with sweeter recollections. So, I won’t subject you or myself to any math. Rather, I will explain in concept how physical parameters such as energy and wave speed affect wave size, which is something you’re going to WANT to know if your day on the beach takes an unexpected turn for the disastrous.

Photo Credit: Asian Tsunami Video

Wave Shoaling

Water may travel in waves on the open sea, but each wave is in turn composed of hoards of molecules. So while we see ocean waves as a surface oscillation (an up and then down motion of the water) beneath the surface, the composite water molecules are tracing quite different paths. Water molecules in a wave travel in great ellipses, or circles. The molecules closest to the water’s surface have the most fun on the merry-go-round, which you can see in the diagram below, while those at the bottom, nearest to the ocean floor are seriously considering asking for a refund.

Photo Credit: The COMET Program

When a wave is far out at sea where the ocean floor lies many thousands of metres away from the surface, these particle motions are hidden beneath the water and are felt at the surface as a swell. Regular ocean waves or “wind waves” with a garden-variety wavelength of 30 to 40 metres (100 to 130 ft.) are experienced as the kind of rolling up-down motion that can turn you green around the gills if you have a delicate constitution.

Tsunamis, on the other hand, have such a large wavelength that for hundreds of kilometres the water would almost seem to go still as you ride up the side of a very long, yet shallow swell, which belies the presence of the roiling monster passing beneath your very feet. Out at sea, thankfully, you’re none the wiser and also totally safe. On shore, however, things are about to get super soggy.

As a wave travels towards land, the sea bottom rises to meet the continental shelf and then the actual shore. The shallower water slows down or decreases the velocity of the incoming waves. What doesn’t change is the amount of energy the wave is carrying. Think about it: energy IS speed. The faster you run, the more energy you burn. By comparison, relinquishing your hung-over self to the sweet oblivion of your couch requires hardly any energy at all.

Unlike your body, however, waves travelling towards the shore may slow down as they breach shallower depths, but the amount of energy contained by their infinite composite particles remains the same. It’s like running a marathon even though you’re facedown in your couch. Oh look! A quarter!

What does this all mean? Well, if a wave isn’t spending all that energy on travelling fast and yet its energy remains the same when it slows down, where the hell does it all go?

The answer is UP!

So, as a wave approaches the shore, it slows down and compensates by increasing in height. It then becomes visible above the surface of the ocean as rolling, tumbling water… the kind that stringy haired, gnarly Californians like to surf. Wave shoaling essentially explains this process. It’s how those great undulating swells you experience out on the open ocean turn into breaking waves on the shore.

As tsunamis hit shallower water, the seafloor rears up to become dry land and the entire monstrous size of the wave is revealed. It’s owing to the vast wavelengths (and small amplitudes) of these giant waves that they go by completely unnoticed on the open ocean by those Japanese fishermen. All that they would have felt was a slight sea swell, which would be virtually indistinguishable from any of the other swells they had been sitting on all day long. However, the up-to-200km wavelength of the tsunami and its arrival in shallower waters results in the sudden and eerie recess of the sea – like an anomalous low tide – only to bring it crashing back in a surge of super “high tide” that’s so swift and violent, beach goers have only seconds to plan their exit strategies. If there are palm trees nearby, make sure you pick a sturdy one.

You might be there awhile.

Tsunami Statistics (Say That Three Times Fast)

The December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that famously struck a number of Thailand’s popular resort towns was generated by a 9.2 magnitude earthquake and killed more than 230,000 people in 14 countries bordering the ocean. Over two million people were negatively affected by this tsunami with the greatest number of deaths being recorded in Indonesia (165,708). The estimated cost of the damage done to countries from Indonesia, Thailand and Myanmar to Sri-Lanka, Kenya and Somalia was $15 billion according to the Disaster Prevention Organization.

The March 2011 Pacific Ocean tsunami that struck Tokyo, Japan, was caused by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake – the largest to have affected Japan on record. The tsunami that made landfall on the 11th of the month reached over 9 metres (30 ft.) in height and caused $300 billion worth of material damage. It also claimed the lives of 15,884 people, according to CNN.com, which is not hard to believe when you take a look at some of the spectacular images to have been published after this disaster.

Class Dismissed: Your Take-Home Message 

Tsunamis are big waves caused by the voluminous displacement of water via earthquakes, meteor strikes, iceberg calving, nuclear explosion, landslides, volcanic eruptions and Kirstie Alley at the beach during the nadir of her yo-yo dieting. Tsunamis are one cataclysmic event born from another and for this reason, they are devastating and yet deceptive, because we only know about them when they make landfall.

Owing to their unpredictable nature, they are (surprise) hard to predict and not all tsunami warnings culminate in a tsunami. Likewise, there could be no warning at all and you could find your pacific island holiday rudely interrupted. As with all natural disasters, however, they serve as needed reminders that we are by no means the most powerful force at work on this planet, nor will we ever be.

Today's Sciencey LOL

It’s true! Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajokull hit the skids in April of 2010, throwing out such a monstrous ash cloud that flights across northern and western Europe were grounded for almost a week. While thousands of people were trying to figure out how the hell to get home, the rest of the planet was trying to figure out how the hell to pronounce the name of this damn volcano.

Gird Your Loins, It's El Niño Time!

It took two long haul flights, six plastic wrapped airline meals, three movies, two cantankerous airhostesses and a dangerous brush with halitosis for me to learn about the latest crisis throwing a spanner in the works of the mankind’s (mostly shoddy) attempts to run things smoothly on planet Earth.

I’m talking, of course, about El Niño.

I had to come to Los Angeles to learn that we’re actually teetering on the edge of what the western media is referring to as a “monster El Niño event” and by the time I publish this, we may very well have taken the dive. Where I come from – South Africa – the media and moreover the government pay scant attention to weather and climate issues. This is extremely ironic considering our economy is based on primary industry and that El Niño years are linked with drought in Southern African’s interior. So, in keeping with this relationship, we’re currently facing critical drought conditions for which the government has done nothing to prepare.

Alas! Here in South Africa, the government is far too distracted by President Zuma’s antics in and out of parliament and the country’s courtrooms to worry about the fact that our crops are about to shrivel up faster than Zuma’s manhood when it was explained to him that showering after intercourse does not in fact prevent the transmission of HIV. And unfortunately, they would also rather spend taxpayers’ money on private jets, fancy cars and extravagant lifestyles for its unprecedented number of officials than on research into, and mitigation for climate change and global climate phenomena like El Niño. If you were a selfish, uneducated pack of pricks, wouldn’t you too?

Anyway, that is where my political rant ends. The point is this: I only recently learned that the planet is facing the meanest El Niño event since 1997 and is set to become one of the three strongest on record, like, ever. It’s already causing all kinds of interesting weather anomalies across the world, especially in the United States. So, it’s time for a new blog in which we’ll meet “the boy” wreaking an incredible amount of wanton mischief on our biology, biomes and backyards.

Vainglorious little swine…

Who Is This “Boy” And Why Does He Mischief Thusly?

El Niño refers to the periodic, unusual warming of the ocean waters of the central and eastern equatorial Pacific and it’s named “the boy” in Spanish after the baby Jesus, since it typically occurs around Christmas time. Understanding why El Niño has such extensive impacts upon weather requires us to take a closer look at a very important variable (sea surface temperature) as it usually is versus what it becomes when El Niño buggers around with ocean and atmospheric circulations. And so, the instigator of it all – the key player I need to introduce you to first is…

The Easterly Trade Winds!

 Image Source: mrspruillscience.weebly.com

Over the tropical Pacific Ocean, in other words around the equator, the trade winds blow roughly from east to west (see diagram above). Now, wind may seem like nothing more than moving air until your house gets relocated by a tornado; only then do you realize it’s a force to be reckoned with! So, the effects the northeast and southeast trade winds have on the ocean surface in the equatorial Pacific are quite significant.

The easterlies exert a force on the warm surface water, pushing it and causing it to pile up in the west, so much so that there is actually a 500-milimetre difference in sea surface height between Indonesia (west) and Ecuador (east)! This does a few things:

1. With the warm surface waters being piled up in the west, an 8°C temperature difference is created between the eastern and western equatorial Pacific, with the west being beautifully toasty. A warm ocean surface makes for a sexy, moist atmosphere and the result is a lot of rainfall. This is why Indonesia is beautifully lush.

2. On the other side of the Pacific, the wind pushing the surface waters away from the South American coast causes cold water from depth to rise to the surface (upwell), thereby leaving the ocean here chilly enough to embarrass you if you were dude wearing a speedo swimsuit. And, of course, the air overlying a cold ocean is typically dry and promotes little rainfall.

Ocean upwelling is a really important process, so it deserves a little conversation before we continue. When ocean creatures and critters die, their bodies sink, making the waters at depth wonderfully fertile. The upwelling of this water to the surface brings all this organic matter into the glorious sunshine and this leads to a surge in primary productivity. Of course, with great volumes of delicious algae, plankton and other tiny sea squishies available, every critter in the food chain is given the energy influx it needs to prosper, which essentially means lots of rodgering, lots of babies and lots of biological success. It also means lots of sushi for us.

Oh look! Krill!

Photo Source: http://www.krillfacts.org

So, we have a warm western equatorial Pacific with a rainy atmosphere and a cool eastern equatorial Pacific and a dry atmosphere. That’s the way it USUALLY is with the northeast and southeast trade winds happily blowing.

However: every two to seven years – and there doesn’t appear to be any strict rhyme or reason as to the frequency of this – the normally healthy trade winds stagger and weaken and you would scarcely BELIEVE the cluster f**k of consequences that follow.

 A Specific Account of the Cluster of F**ks That Follow

With the easterly trade winds fizzling out, all the beautifully warm water that is usually swept to the west is allowed to slough back into the east. This causes a tongue of warm water to spread out from the western coastline of North America (see diagrams below).

This diagram shows us December sea surface temperatures (SST) as they normally are over the Pacific Ocean (first image), as El Niño is setting in (middle image) and during the event’s crescendo (final image). You can really see the distribution of heat moving away from the west and becoming concentrated over the eastern equatorial Pacific.

 Image Source: El Niño Southern Oscillation, http://www.ic.ucsc.edu

If this picture series doesn’t tickle your fancy, the following video will…

Video Source: “Amazing New El Niño Animation Reveals Shocking New Details” Uploaded by ShantiUniverse on Youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pc2wYXK3qRk

A key point you must remember is that the ocean and atmosphere seldom, if ever, act independently of each other. One minor change in sea surface temperature can cause the atmosphere to overreact like your girlfriend approximately one week before Aunt Flo arrives for her monthly visit. A warm sea surface leads to greater evaporation, a more humid atmosphere and therefore more rainfall.

So, with ocean heat draining from the usually wet western Pacific, the region is typically left in drought while the east, which is usually dry, becomes unusually wet. On the ground, Indonesia and Australia can experiencing drought and, in Australia’s case, a much greater risk of catastrophic bush fire. On the eastern side of the Pacific, where the ocean has become anomalously warm, unusually heavy rainfall can lead to flooding with the risk being greatest to the southern states of America and Peru.

The El Niño event of 2010 was believed to drive the devastating floods that affected Peru.

 Image Source: http://news.sciencemag.org/climate/2014/08/ancient-piles-clams-reveal-peek-el-ni-os-past

The weakening of the trade winds also negatively affects the upwelling that usually occurs off the western coast of South America and by throttling the source of nutrients these marine ecosystems rely on, organisms of all echelons in the food chain take a major blow. Less importantly (in the grand scheme of things – don’t tell any local fisherman I’m saying this) our fishing industries also suffer. That’s right: less sushi.

Leave sushi alone!

If you thought that’s where it ends, think again. El Niño’s impacts spread further than a desperate housewife’s legs. The accumulation of vast reservoirs of heat energy at the eastern periphery of the equatorial Pacific drive significant changes in global atmospheric circulation, which essentially means that no matter where in the world you live, you can possibly expect the next few months’ of weather to be, uh… interesting.

Crappy Weather Coming To a Neighborhood Near You

Air in the atmosphere is constantly on the move and it’s thanks to our major global atmospheric circulations that all the crap going down in the Pacific is felt in varying degrees across the globe.  Here are some cherry-picked samples of other global consequences:

El Niño events are linked with wilder hurricane seasons in the Pacific. This is terrible news for the Philippines, which is already one of the most disaster-struck countries in the world. According to Colorado State University, there have been 21 Category 4 and above (read: holy crap that’s big!) hurricanes in the north Pacific this year alone. This total has obliterated the previous record of 17, which was set during the monster El Niño of 1997. The good news for Florida and southern Texas is that hurricanes in the Atlantic tend to stay home and pursue their hobbies during El Niño months.

Africa may be half the planet away, but the continent has a decent sized serving of interesting weather to expect. Southern Africa is currently in the throes of severe drought, while several East and North African nations are being pelted by heavy rainfall. I mean, can’t we ever just get the RIGHT amount of rain?? Why must it be one extreme or the other?

And, of course, we can’t leave out the main character in this story of wanton weather: MURICA! The following prediction maps for temperature and rainfall have been issued by the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on their amazing website, which you can view at www.climate.gov.

Temperature forecast for the period December 2015 to February 2016

 What we can tell from this map (aside from the fact that NOAA doesn’t give a hoot about Canada) is that there is a good chance of temperatures being hotter than usual in much of Alaska, Washington and the northern U.S. with dark red indicating a 70%+ probability of hotter than usual conditions. Texas and much of the southern states, on the other hand, may actually have to invest in a sweater or two. 

Class Dismissed: Your Take-Home Message
Is it the end of the world? Should you start looting your neighborhood grocery store and stocking up on bottled water and canned beans? No. Well, no to the first one: no harm ever came from having an extra can of baked beans, but you may want to prepare your home if you’re in an area that’s at risk of flood or drought. The question on the media’s lips is: is this particularly strong El Niño event proof of climate change and the severe weather we can come to expect from a globally warmer atmospheric environment?

Until we can say what causes the easterly trade winds to die down every two to seven years, we won’t be able to define the relationship between El Niño events and global warming. What is pretty evident – and has been talked about by climate scientists for years – is that a warmer atmosphere contains more moisture (due to greater evaporation) and more energy and is therefore more prone to the development of severe storms.

Your take-home message is this: The atmosphere is like the movie Cloud Atlas: It’s complicated and no matter how closely you study it, you still wonder what the f**k happened in the end. Just remember that the next time you hurl insults at the weatherman for getting the forecast wrong!

3 Incredible Videos of Hurricanes Behaving Badly

And now for a sampling of nature’s finest hurricane videos. Batten down the hatches, because it’s only in the bedroom that it’s fun getting banged like a screen door in a hurricane!

#1: “Hurricane Wilma Hits Southern Florida”

In this awesome science video, watch palm trees head-banging in the wind like a gathering of gangly punk rock kids as hurricane Wilma flattens South Florida in 2005.

#2: “Hurricane Sandy: Timelapse of the Storm from the New York Times Building”

Appreciate a far better vantage point than most New Yorkers had of the storm that caused the Big Apple a serious headache in 2012! Watch Hurricane Sandy roll in and over NYC  from the safety of the Times Building. It’s terrifyingly beautiful from this ivory tower.

#3: “Hurricane Katrina Satellite Timelapse”

Katrina’s fender bender with the southern states (2005): This is a must-see for a lesson in hurricane formation, from hazy blip over the Bahamas to a monstrous storm system that swarms and spins like your head after a night of tequila swilling!

Shocking Video of Lighting in Slow Motion

This clip from Discovery Channel’s “Raging Planet” shows lightning in super slow motion leave the cloud and connect with the ground. Capturing and watching this footage is helping atmospheric scientists develop a much better understanding of how lightning works. For the rest of us lay folk, it makes for some super interesting visual entertainment!

Video Source: Discovery Channel “Raging Planet” – Lightning. Uploaded by ONE Interpreting on YouTube channel www.youtube.com/watch?v=64WMsNRJvDo

Like Why? Because Science‘s Facebook page to receive sexy doses of entertaining science on the daily!

Enlightening! How Lightning is Made

 

What’s more than ten kilometres (6 miles) long, five times hotter than the surface of an average star and packs in more strokes per second than an over-zealous teenage boy who’s just discovered the joy of internet porn?

Yeah, I know. The picture kind of gives it away doesn’t it?

I have had a complete love affair with thunderstorms for as long as I can remember. I think they are the most awe-inspiring and yet paradoxical demonstration of nature’s prodigious temper and seductive grace. In the space of an hour, the sky can go from an azure blue to the colour of dark slate as giant cumulonimbus clouds broil and swell with latent energy.

Thunderstorms generate all kinds of severe weather: torrential downpours, vicious winds, hail, microbursts and even tornadoes. But they indirectly owe their very name to the one weather feature that claims the lives of, on average, 55 people every year in the United States: lightning!

Shocking Statistics

Source: Global distribution of lightning April 1995 – February 2003 from the combined observations of the NASA OTD (4/95-3/00) and LIS (1/98-2/03) instruments.

Approximately 8 million bolts of lightning strike the Earth every single day, starting 10,000 forest fires annually. In the United States, over 300,000 insurance claims are made against lightning damage every year and the bill for this damage is a staggering $400,000,000.

Yes. Thunderstorms are seriously dangerous systems. I shouldn’t have to tell you that and yet countless golfers are killed by lightning every year. Could there be anything less intelligent than standing in the middle of a wide open space during a thunderstorm with a metal rod in your hand pointed at the sky? With five billion joules of energy surging through a single lightning bolt – enough energy to illuminate a 100 watt bulb for three months – you are picking a fight you simply cannot win.

Against all logic, according to the U.S. National Weather Service, lightning STILL kills more people than tornadoes AND hurricanes combined. What is this madness?

It’s Electricity! 

Thunderstorms are extremely busy weather systems. Within a storm cell, legions of water vapour particles are whipped, flung and tumbled around by complex air circulations. Storms themselves are powered by strong updrafts of hot, moist air. This air cools and condenses as it rises through the heights of the lower atmosphere, becoming dense. It consequently loses its upward momentum and sinks and spills out of the rear of the thunderstorm (check out the diagram below).

Photo Credit: “Thunderstorm formation” by NOAA T-storm-mature-stage.jpg. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Together, these motions form a continuous cycle of updrafts and downdrafts, which provides the storm system the energy it needs to electrocute golfers, whip cows into the air and blow Dorothy and her dog, Toto, into a parallel reality.

How does this explain what lightning is? Well, it brings us a lot closer to understanding cloud polarization. OMG. What does that mean?

Clouds Can be Bi-Polar Too

Just like batteries, molecules and certain members of your family, clouds too can become bi-polar. Within a thunderstorm, legions of water vapour particles get swirled around violently by the turbulent air circulations. But there are two predominant movements of air in a single cell storm system: hot moist air going up and colder drier air going down.

The water vapour particles being swept up into the cloud smash into those going down and these collisions, while totally invisible to us, are violent enough to cause the descending water particles to literally tear electrons off of the ascending water particles. Electrons are negative. So you see there is a gradual separation of charge within a thundercloud as the descending water particles become negatively charged and the rising water particles (having had an electron or two pilfered from their orbitals) become positively charged.

Credit: Earth Science Australia

As a result of particle motions within a thunderstorm, the lower cloud regions become negatively charged and the upper cloud regions positively charged. A positive charge is induced in the ground immediately below the thunderstorm in response to storm’s electric field.

The story doesn’t end here: the polarization of the thundercloud has an effect on its environment, namely, the surface of the Earth and the various objects on it. An electrical field swells outwards from the cloud, caressing the electrons belonging to Earth’s atoms, seducing them into moving. Those who studied physics will remember, electron movement = charge.

The presence of such a massive reservoir of negative charge immediately above the Earth’s surface repels its negatively charged electrons (like repels like), causing an opposing positive charge to build up. In other words, trees, poles, buildings and your head actually develop a static positive charge in the seconds prior to lightning strike. This is probably why people who have been struck by lightning and have lived to tell the tale say that they felt their hair stand on end just before they become a living conductor for 1,000,000,000 volts of electricity.

Zap!

At some critical juncture, nature notices the thunderstorm’s complete disregard for her love of equilibrium and so a raging streak of electricity discharges between the negative and positively-charged cloud regions. Or the negatively charged lower cloud regions and the positively charged ground immediately below it. And ZAP! You get lightning!

I can feel the cogs of your mind over-heating. So, if you aren’t quite happy with this explanation, then watch the movie Thor. While it doesn’t provide any scientific explanation on lightning genesis whatsoever, Chris Hemsworth is so beautiful you will forget your intellectual torment immediately *swoon*

Guys… you can enjoy watching Natalie Portman at her career low. In a lab coat.

I know I did.

Thunder, Contrary to Kindergarten Mythology, is Not God’s Fart

In spite of my illuminating explanations above – coupled with your homework to watch Thor – the exact physics of lightning generation are not entirely understood. Thunder, on the other hand, is and its explanation makes for a very interesting story. You may want to remember this so you can impress a future date with it…

When lightning tears out of a cloud, the air in the discharge channel heats up from ambient air temperature to a toasty 28,000°C or 50,000°F. That’s approximately five times hotter than the surface of our Sun. And all of this happens in as little as 90 microseconds. I know, right? A yawning chasm of a time denomination.

The problem is, you can’t heat anything up from 10°C to 28,000°C in this short amount of time without some kind of catastrophic consequence. So when lightning shows the ill social etiquette of doing so, the air expands violently, generating a shockwave that explodes outwards from the discharge channel. This shockwave travels faster than the speed of sound – it’s supersonic – so we can’t actually hear it. Dogs probably could, but you’ll have to ask one to be certain.

With distance from the discharge channel, this shockwave slows down and as it does it falls within our audio range. That’s when we hear thunder. I have heard that if you stand close enough to lightning you won’t actually hear it, because the shockwave is supersonic. While this makes sense in theory, human trials are pending. It also explains why, when a storm is very close, the lightning makes a sharp cracking explosive sound while, when further away, you hear the thunder as a low sexy rumble.

Class Dismissed: Your Take-Home Message

More people die of lightning injuries in Florida than anywhere else in America and perhaps even the world. While I’m aware that they have an amazing water world playground at their feet, they also have the highest lightning strike density in the entirety of the United States. Perhaps y’all should bear that in mind the next time you go wind surfing in an electrical storm.

Regardless of where you live, however, if you value your life then don’t swim, don’t bath, don’t chat on a land line, don’t play golf, don’t stand under a tree and don’t go running around like Julie Andrews in a thunderstorm. Otherwise, it won’t just be music the hills are alive with.

Oh, and enjoy the show! Isn’t nature spectacular?

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Terrifying Footage of 2011 Tsunami in Japan

On March 11th, 2011, a record-breaking 8.9-magnitude earthquake shook the very foundations of the Earth off the east coast of Japan. Only hours after the earthquake struck, a wall of water 23-feet high slammed into Japan totally devastating much of its low-lying coastal areas – urban and rural alike. Cars, homes, ships, debris, vegetation and people were violently swept away as the tsunami pounded ashore.

The Pacific rim was put on high alert, but thankfully only Hawaii seemed to feel the effects of the 2011 tsunami and even then, the damage was not major. The tsunami that hit Japan on this fateful day was recorded as being more than 7-meters high. It claimed the lives of hundreds of people and injured countless more.

Video Source: “Incredible HD Footage of Japan Tsunami” uploaded by FinalCutKing on YouTube channel https://youtu.be/J2hUwFo6Vpc

What was so spectacular to see in the aftermath of the 2011 tragedy was Japan’s incredibly swift recovery from the disaster. Authorities wasted no time in repairing the roads and infrastructure that was damaged by the tsunami and the electrical fires it caused. The rest of the world can certainly learn from Japan’s efficiency and alacrity in responding to disaster management and mitigation.

Run For Cover! Awesome Meteorite Footage

Few things fascinate us quite like our worst nightmares and while we may not actively think about devastating meteorite impacts punching an inconvenient hole into our day, such an event would certainly serve to put things into perspective for us! For example, cold coffee, traffic jams and your imbecile boss are not the end of the world. A meteorite impact could be.

Let’s take a look at some spectacular footage of space objects having fender benders with our planet.

Meteorite Soars into Tyumen, Chelyabinsk and Yekaterinburg, Russia, Feb 13th 2013: A Compilation of the Internet’s Best Clips

Meteor Footage Video Source: Uploaded by LifeBeyondEarth on YouTubeChannel https://youtu.be/UqrA007yZWQ

Want to hear a joke? The Russian meteorite in this video was considered “small.” Gosh, NASA scientists and their size issues! First Pluto and now this?

Eight months after this meteorite collided into the Earth, it was finally extracted from its resting place in Lake Chebarkul. It weighed a staggering 570 kg, which explains the damage it did to more than 3,000 nearby buildings and 1,000 people. The blast of this meteorite was estimated to carry the equivalent punch of 300,000 tonnes of dynamite.

Beautiful Time Lapse Video of Geminid Meteor Shower, December 30th, 2012

Meteor Footage Video Source: Uploaded by Kenneth Brandon (Dark Sky Chaser) on YouTube Channel https://youtu.be/S_jdfyp8pL0

Every December, the heavens rain down Christmas upon avid sky-watchers and star enthusiasts in the form of the beautiful, glittering Geminid Meteor shower. In this video, photographer Kenneth Brandon filmed the entire event and then sped it up so that we can truly appreciate why this event is actually called a “meteor shower” in the first place. In the first sequence, we see the star trails in addition to the meteors, which in reality are probably no bigger than grains of sand. In the second sequence, the meteor trails have been rendered persistent by some nimble filming techniques. Gorgeous!

The End of the World Asteroid Impact: Animated Conjecture By JDC Creation

Meteor Footage Video Source: Uploaded by JDC Creation on YouTubeChannel https://youtu.be/pe3s2G8ulBc

Now THIS is something to start your day with! What happened if a gigantic asteroid smacked into Earth and Bruce Willis wasn’t available to stop it? This video. This animated short video provides us with front row seats to the end of the world.

Terrifying Video of Avalanche Hitting Everest Base Camp

In April of this year, tremors and earthquakes thoroughly shook up the country of Nepal, as well as the Himalayan mountain range, which lies over a continental plate boundary (where two continental tectonic plates are colliding). In addition to totally devastating the city of Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital, the earthquakes triggered several avalanches, one of which was filmed by Jost Kobusch at the Everest Base Camp…

Video Source: “Hit by Avalanche in Everest Basecamp, 25-04-2015” uploaded by Jost Kobusch on YouTube channel https://youtu.be/_JC_wIWUC2U