Are you interested in exciting weather, thunderstorms, earthquakes, Tornadoes, hurricanes
What is your favorite exciting weather story?
Have you been caught in a downpour or a gale or a Nor'Easter? Have you experienced a volcano or an earthquake or a tsunami? Do you love poetry about the earth or pictures of pretty clouds? Have you visited Yellowstone Park and heard about its monstrous supervolcanoes? Have you ever seen a tornado? have you ever experienced a hurricane?
Are you curious about plate tectonics?
Please tell your story!
What Other Visitors Have Said
Click below to see contributions from other visitors to this page...
The Great Hurricane of Sept. 19, 1846
Not rated yet
I was born in 1938, the year of the Great Hurricane. I grew up in a New England seaport town. I remember how exciting the hurricanes were for, after ...
Hurricanes
HOW DO HURRICANES FORM?
About temperature, winds and weather The first thermometer was built by Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit in 1724. He chose 32° as the freezing point of pure water and 212° as the boiling point. Anders Celsius (1701–1744) later on suggested a scale based on 100° between freezing and boiling, but he wanted 100° to be the freezing point and 0° to be the boiling point. It wasn’t until his death that the present convention, 0° freezing and 100° boiling point was established. Edmund Halley made an ocean trip in 1686 to the Indies during which he prepared the world’s first meteorologial map; this was of the area of tropical latitudes of the Indian and Atlantic oceans. He explained the direction and force of the winds as a result of solar heating of the air at the equator. When the air warmed, it rose and left an area of low pressure below where cool air from the poles would be drawn in. The warm air would travel to the poles where the process would be repeated in a giant cycle. He was almost correct; the correct explanation came about 50 years later when George Hadley explained that the earth’s rotation would cause what is now known as the Coriolis Effect. Picture a child playing on a merry-go-round. If she threw a ball to a friend at the other side of the merry-go-round, the ball would appear to travel a curved path and not arrive at the friend's position.The winds returning from the poles to the equator would be rotated so as to become easterly winds. These winds are called the easterlies. The cells which rotate from the equator to about 30° latitude, both north and south are now called Hadley cells. The are two other cell types: from about 30° to 60° the cells are called Ferrel cells which rotate oppositely to the Hadley cells and those from about 60° to the poles are called Polar cells. These polar cells rotate in the same sense as the Hadley cells. HadleyCells Simplified; Thanks to Ms. Tinka Sloss of New Media Studio Polar,Ferrel and Hadley Cells; Thanks to Ms. Tinka Sloss of New Media Studio Types of World Wide Tropical Storms; Thanks to Ms. Tinka Sloss of New Media Studio A hurricane is a tropical cyclone, a storm system characterized by a large low-pressure center and numerous thunderstorms that produce strong winds and heavy rain. Tropical cyclones feed on heat released when moist air rises, resulting in condensation of water vapor contained in the moist air.  This image of Cyclone Monica is a work of the University of Wisconsin Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies. This Category 5 cyclone hit Northeastern Australia on April 17,2006 with sustained winds of 180 Miles per hour. Meteorologists generally recognize three classes of tropical cyclones stratified by their highest one-minute average surface wind speed. Tropical Depressions have maximum wind speed less than 39 mph (and, in practice, generally greater than 20-25 mph). Maximum wind speed from 39 to 73 mph characterizes Tropical Storms. Hurricanes have wind speeds of at least 74 mph. Of the defining criteria, the closed nature of the circulation in weak systems, the thermodynamic structure, and the precise intensity cannot always be determined objectively. (Note: This paragraph is quoted from the National Hurricane Center web page.) These big storms are graded into five categories according to their sustained wind speed:
Category one: sustained winds 74-95 mph
Category two: sustained winds 96-100 mph.
Category three: sustained winds 111-130 mph.
Category four: sustained winds 131-155 mph.
Category five: sustained winds Greater than 155 mph. Hurricane KatrinaKatrina on August 29, 2005, a category five as it approached the coast, and a category four at landfall, was a killer with 1,836 estimated dead and damage of about 100 billion dollars. The hardest hit area was New Orleans, Louisiana, with about 180,000 homes under water during the subsequent flood as the levees on Lake Ponchatrain burst.The terrible effects are still being felt, four years later, in New Orleans, Louisiana and in Mississippi parishes such as Bay St Louis, Waveland, Biloxi and Pascagoula. Hurricane Katrina at or near peak intensity, water vapor band . The peak winds of over 100 miles per hour that buffeted New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina could have been much worse had the storm made landfall at a different moment in the cycle of its eyewall. Long-lived, intense hurricanes often go through an eyewall replacement cycle that takes a day or so to complete. The result is collapse of the main eyewall and temporary weakening of the storm. This water vapor band image shows Katrina at or near its peak intensity with an intact eyewall as it moved over warm water in the Gulf of Mexico at 5:45 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on Sunday, August 28, 2005. Jeff Weber, UCAR scientist, generated this image using GEMPAK software and data from the water vapor and infrared bands of NOAA's GOES-E satellite.  The source of this material is Windows to the Universe, at http://www.windows.ucar.edu/ at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR). © 2010 The Regents of the University ofMichigan. Windows to the Universe® is a registered trademark of UCAR.All Rights Reserved.
Another big storm was even more deadly than Katrina, hit Galveston in 1900.
Many years later another killer storm hit New England in 1938.
Typhoon Mirinae in the phillipines was a category 2 typhoon . It killed about 43 people in the Phillipines and in Vietnam on Oct 30 to Nov 2, 2009 |
