Archive for February, 2007

The past two articles talked about the recent storm system that caused a blizzard in Wisconsin and heavy freezing rain in Illinois. The third and final article about this storm is about the southern end of the recent storm and a powerful tornado that devastated the town of Dumas, Arkansas.

What caused these tornadoes?
The cold front associated with low pressure system that causes a blizzard in Wisconsin and freezing rain in Illinois generated the formation of thunderstorms. The cold front brought in cold winter air from the northern US. This cold air combined with moist warm air to create updraft of air that formed the thunderstorm clouds. Once again, the currently strong jet stream over Arkansas played a big role. These upper levels winds enhanced spinning columns of air that are found in all thunderstorms. The updraft winds rotated these columns of air to a vertical position and this results in a rotating wall cloud.

As the storm becomes more powerful, heavy rainfall causes an area of air called the rear flank downdraft (RFD). The RFD’s rapid descent drags the rotating wall cloud close to the surface. At this point, a funnel cloud drops out of the funnel cloud and causes death and destruction on the ground.

Why does the funnel cloud form?
At this point, it remains unclear but many scientists are working on figuring this out. Stay tuned for more on this.

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Posted by Tim Roth, author of the political blog Think Anew and Act Anew

Sources:
1. “Neccessary Ingredients for Thunderstorms”, NOAA’s JetStream – Online School for Weather
2. “Thunderstorm Hazards – Tornadoes”, NOAA’s JetStream – Online School for Weather
3. “Cyclogenesis”, Wikipedia entry

In addition, to the heavy snow that fell in Wisconsin last night and today there was a significant freezing rain event in Illinois. In Mercer County, there were reports of a 2 inch coating of ice on power lines. Add strong winds to the equation and it’s easy to see why 83,000 people lost their power.

What is freezing rain?
Freezing rain forms when a layer of warmer air aloft traps a shallow layer of colder air at the surface. As the rain or snow falls to the surface it melts in the warmer air, reaches the cold air and starts to supercool (cooling a liquid to temperature below it’s freezing point without the liquid becoming solid), then the precipitation freezes on contact with power lines, trees, and roads. The key is the depth of the cold air at the surface, if the layer is deep enough the rain will have time to freeze into relatively harmless sleet. Sleet is separate particles of moisture and can be moved around with a shovel or plow. Freezing rain on the other hand, forms a solid layer of ice because just before the liquid water freezes it molds to the power lines, pores in the road, and already formed freezing rain. One of the more notable freezing rain events took in place in 1998 when an area that included Montreal, Quebec and Northern New York was coated with a devastating 60 to 120 millimeters (3-4.5 inches) of freezing rain. Some people went without power for weeks and close to 30 people died due to the ice.

I couldn’t find a solid source for exact mechanism behind this particular freezing rain event, but my semi-educated guess is the counter-clockwise rotation of this storm system swept up warm air (via a warm front) from the south and this warm air was undercut by a strong and cold east wind that maintained freezing temperatures. This strong wind was due to the high pressure air mass of freezing temperatures that a particular strong jet stream rammed this storm system into.

For more about this storm system and the blizzard further north, click here.

The next article and stop on the tour of this storm will be the tornadoes that occurred to the south. Stay tuned for that.

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Posted by Tim Roth, author of the political blog Think Anew and Act Anew

Sources:
1. “Midwest suffers through brutal snow system”, CNN.com article
2. “Freezing rain”, Wikipedia entry
3. “North American ice storm of 1998″, Wikipedia entry

Current weather bulletin for my corner of the world from from the U.S. National Weather Service:

“A blizzard warning is in effect tonight for all of South Central and Southeast Wisconsin. Snowfall tonight will reach 8 to 14 inches (20 to 36 cm) with some locally heavier amounts possible across much of the area. Strong easterly winds gusting up to 40 mph (64 km/h) at times will result in blizzard conditions at times with visibilities severely restricted to one-quarter mile (400 m) or less at time tonight into Sunday…..The heavy snow may be accompanied by lightning and thunder.”

Sure enough, about half an hour ago as I was doing the research for this article I could hear the rumble of thunder along with the howl of old man winter. As the above weather bulletin reads, the Upper Midwest especially Wisconsin is being slammed with a blizzard.

Here’s the current weather map for the Upper Midwest from the Weather Channel’s website.

As I’m writing this, there is very powerful low pressure system (the red “L” is the center) that is packed full of moisture. The light purple front line is called an occluded front and represents the merging of cold and warm fronts found in strong systems. (This will be explained in future artices). The faint white lines represent the same atmospheric pressure along the line. As you can see the lines are packed together tightly over the upper midwest. This means lots of wind because air is rapidly moving to stabilize the pressure gradient.

The driving force behind all the moisture and wind is the jet stream that is currently very dynamic. Below is the path of the current jet stream:

The very sharp upward swing of the jet stream helped to steer the system rapidly from the moisture-rich southern US and rammed the storm into the cold winter air of Wisconsin.

More importantly, the current jet stream is very fast-moving and created a stronger cyclonic effect on this low pressure area. This is known of extratropical cyclogenesis. Another way to describe this is that the jet stream helped to form a tighter ball of low pressure energy. Although the process of formations are vastly different, this is the same cyclonic effect that makes hurricanes so powerful. The low pressure center is essentially the “eye” of this storm.

There you have it. I’m just glad that I don’t have to go out tomorrow.

Update: The next two articles will be a north to south tour of this nasty storm system. The article about the freezing rain in Illinois can be found here and stay tuned for a 3rd article on the tornadoes to the south.

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Posted by Tim Roth, author of the political blog Think Anew and Act Anew

Sources:
1. National Weather Service Bulletin from the Milwaukee, WI office – February 24, 2007 (no permalinks available)
2. Weather Channel TV broadcast February 24, 2007
3. Weather Channel website – Current Midwest Weather and Jet Stream (no permalinks for these constantly changing maps)
4. “Blizzard”, Wikipedia entry
5. “Cyclogenesis”, Wikipedia entry

This picture was taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft on February 14, 1990 at a distance of 4 billion miles away from Earth. The idea for the picture was advocated by the famous astronomer Carl Sagan. In his book Pale Blue Dot, he wrote the following in regards to this famous picture:

“We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

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Posted by Tim Roth, author of the political blog Think Anew and Act Anew

I really liked how former Vice-President talked about the famous “Earthrise” picture in his book An Inconvenient Truth. This famous picture taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts as they traveled around the Moon. Seeing this picture had a powerful impact on how humanity viewed its home.

Al Gore included a poem written by Archibald MacLeish that was inspired by this picture.

“To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold–brothers who know now that they are truly brothers.”

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Posted by Tim Roth, author of the political blog Think Anew and Act Anew

As governments around the world consider more rigorous controls on carbon emissions to fight the effects of global warming, I’ve noticed that many critics of these measures are quick to cite the fact that many scientists during the 1970’s were talking about global cooling and the beginning of a new Ice Age.

At first, this seems like a compelling argument against regulating carbon emissions, but that was the 1970’s and this is 2007. Climate change is extremely difficult to predict and a climate study in 2007 is going to be much more accurate considering the advances technology during the last several decades. Plus, there were more pressing problems then the carbon dioxide emissions that trap heat in the lower atmosphere. Scientists, politicians, and public were focused on particulate and sulfuric acid pollution because of problems like acid rain. In addition, it was feared that all this particulate matter in the atmosphere would block some of the sun’s energy and cause the surface to cool down. Finally, there was evidence that the planet was entering into the ice age part of the planet’s climate cycle. (This is a big topic that deserves a lot of articles, so stay tuned for that.)

Anyway, as laws that mandated cleaner air were (for the most part) a success, more and more attention was directed towards carbon dioxide emissions. Scientists began to realize that warming effects were overwhelming the trend of global cooling!

So, the moral of the story is that bringing up climate science from the 1970’s isn’t really an effective argument because of the advances in technology.

Stay tuned for more on climate change on our planet: look for articles about the past, present, and future of our climate.

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Posted by Tim Roth, author of the political blog Think Anew and Act Anew

Source:
1. “Remember Worries About Global Cooling?”

One of many items on my “things to do before I die” list, is see a major aurora borealis (Northern Lights) event. I’ve seen a few here in Wisconsin, but they are nothing compared to the beautiful nighttime shows that take place in polar locations like Alaska. Or visit the Southern Hemisphere for a Southern Lights or aurora australis show. (australis is Latin for “of the south”)

What causes the auroras?
Like any nuclear reaction, the thermonuclear reactor that is our Sun emits a steady flow of hot plasma from it’s million-degree outer surface known as solar wind. (Plasma is a gas of free electrons and positions ions – as matter becomes more energetic it goes from solid to liquid to gas to plasma – this is a energy state so hot that the atoms break apart into separate particles). This stream of charged particles flows towards the Earth at about 400km/s (about 15,000 mph) and for the most part, the flows smoothly around the Earth’s protective magnetosphere and continues onward towards space. However, there are occasional disruptions which cause the particles to barrel down towards the Earth. These highly energized particles collide with gas molecules in the upper atmosphere and induces them into an excited energy state. As the gas molecule cools down to it’s original energy state it releases the stunning greens, blues, reds, and whites of the aurora.

While everyone agrees how breathtaking auroras are, there is debate among scientists about the mechanism of these disruptions that cause geomagnetic storms. On Saturday, NASA launched a Delta II rocket carrying five identical probes of the THEMIS mission that will work together to analyze the geomagnetic storms. Not only will the five probes be working on the case, there will a great collaboration between satellites of the European Space Agency’s Cluster mission, the Double Star mission of the Chinese space agency, and 20 ground stations in Alaska and Canada.

Stay tuned for updates on the THEMIS mission, auroras, and how the activity of sun affects our daily lives in the obvious and not so obvious ways.

Interesting factoid: THEMIS stands for Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms. That’s a mouthful, but a simpler factoid behind the mission name is that Themis is the mythological Greek goddess of justice, wisdom, good counsel, and the guardian of oaths.

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Posted by Tim Roth, author of the political blog Think Anew and Act Anew

Sources:
1. Official webpage of NASA’s THEMIS mission”
2. “NASA’s Aurora mission blasts off”, BBC article
3. “Aurora (astronomy)”, Wikipedia entry

In recent articles, the topic was the Sentinelese (category link) a hunter-gatherer tribe that is virtually untouched by modern civilization. They are extremely hostile to outsiders and even shot arrows at a Indian Air Force helicopter surveying the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

This article is about another interesting story of anthropology and what happens when worlds collide. The setting is the nation of Vanautu, an archipelago about 1,000 miles east of Australia. One of Vanautu’s islands, Tanna has about 30,000 residents and roughly 20% still practice a “cargo cult” called John Frum.

Cargo cult is term to describe what has happened when modern technology suddenly appears to isolated cultures. Local indigenous people assume that this technology was made by divine spirits and this sparks a cult that engages in activities like imitating the dress and behavior of the outsiders. This occurrence was widespread in WWII, when the American and Japanese military brought a massive amount of food, weapons, and other war matériel to their islands for the Pacific campaign.

After WWII was over, the endless supply chain of military supplies suddenly ceased when the outsiders left. They assumed that the Americans and Japanese knew how to summon their ancestors to send magical cargo from the heavens. So, they thought that if they behaved the same way, their ancestors would also deliver cargo planes full of canned goods and rifles. There are numerous accounts of islanders wearing headphones carved out of wood and sitting in control towers waiting for planes of cargo to arrive. They diligently maintained torches to light up runways at night and even saluted each other.

As you may have guessed, it wasn’t too long before these cults faded out but John Frum is still going fairly strong today because the arrival of the American military enhanced an existing pre-WWII cult. Back in the 1930’s, a cult was formed under the premise that if the islanders resisted all forms of European society, all the foreigners would leave and they would get to have all the material wealth that their colonial masters possessed. This cult picked up stream as WWII approached, but when 300,000 Americans arrived, the cult’s prophesy became much more believable. Not only did the Americans have enormous amounts of power and cargo, members of John Frum were deeply impressed that white and black American soldiers were working together in a way that highly contrasted to the treatment they received from the white colonists. All this led them to believe that their savior was an American. (The cult name John Frum probably came about because of the way American soldiers would introduce themselves: “Hi, I’m John from America”)

In the hope of attracting their American savior to fulfill the prophesy and being prosperity to all, every February 15th is John Frum Day in parts of Tanna. They conduct elaborate ceremonies at the base of Mount Yasur an active volcano where the spirit of John Frum is said to reside. Dressed in an old military uniform with adorned with medals and even the badge of the 101st Airborne, Chief Isaac Wan presided over the 50th John Frum Day earlier this week. Members of the cult with “USA” painted on their chests conducted drills with bamboo rifles, saluted a huge American flag, and played the American national anthem on bamboo flutes.

While this is interesting from anthropology standpoint, Marty Meth, a tourist from New York described a light-hearted viewpoint of the ceremony: “It’s really nice to see Americans welcome here since in so many places in the world we’re not so welcome these days.”

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Posted by Tim Roth, author of the political blog Think Anew and Act Anew

Sources:
1. “Cargo cult lives on in South Pacific” by Phil Mercer, BBC News

2. “Cargo cult”, Wikipedia entry.

3. “John Frum”, Wikipedia entry.

Thanks to the work of NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), there is now additional evidence that water might have (and may still) flow on the surface.

The MRO captured images of a hilly landscape consisting of bands of light and dark rock in Candor Chasma, part of the Mars rift valley Valles Marineris. These bands are very similar to band found on earth where there is a cycle of water. In addition, researchers from the University of Arizona described numerous “halos” of bleached rock were cracks (the official term is joints) in the surface where the surface rock clearly reacted some kind of fluid. This fluid, whether it be water or liquid carbon dioxide probably came from underground reservoirs.

Like with story a couple months of very recent erosion on a crater (within a few year), it’s uncertain whether this was caused water or liquid carbon dioxide. Nevertheless, this story is still very significant because these halos would be a good place to look for evidence of life. These haloes were once underground, but have been exposed due to erosion. Back in the day, the overlying rock would have been a great shield from the harsh Martian atmosphere while life was supported below by underground reservoirs.

For some pictures of the Candor Chasma check out the BBC article on this story. They have three pictures from the original research article published journal Science that you can enlarge for a better look.

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Posted by Tim Roth, author of the political blog Think Anew and Act Anew

You have heard resveratrol in the news lately, but if not you will because this nutritional supplement will soon become available in more mainstream stores like Walgreens.

Resveratrol is a compound found in trace amounts in the skin of red grapes and in red wine. Studies of mice have been very promising. Overfed mice didn’t gain weight and seemed to slow their aging process.

While these benefits are yet to be proven in humans, it does look promising. Researchers like Dr. David Sinclair of the Harvard Medical School have found that resveratrol works by entering a cell and activating a enzyme called SIRT1. This enyzme stimulates the growth of new mitochondria (the “engines” of cells) and this increases the metabolic rate. The possible benefits to increased mitochondria are weight reduction, increased exercise endurance and the prevention of diabetes, cancer, heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s disease. Nice.

Stay tuned for more information on resveratrol, especially as more studies on humans are conducted.

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Posted by Tim Roth, author of the political blog Think Anew and Act Anew

Source:
“Can red wine help you live forever?” by David Stipp, Fortune Magazine