Technocrat

Recent New England Tornado to be Studied for Years

zogger
Thu Jul 31 15:41:00 -0700 2008
Environment
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National Weather Service researchers say the recent large tornado that chewed through 50 miles of New Hampshire countryside was so unusual they will be studying it for years. Small by midwest and plain's states "tornado alley" scales, it was still large, long lasting and fairly unexpected for New England, which just doesn't get many tornadoes at all. They want to look at the conditions that spawned the tornado in the first place to be better able to predict severe storms that can cause tornadoes in the future.

Researchers will study aerial views and widespread ground damage, documenting it all at the forecast office in Gray, Maine, where the radar from that day will become history. ed.z.: it's one thing to see what tornadoes do when they go through flat and mostly open farm land, you see what it does to mature forests and so on, just amazing. I've seen the damage from one such critter, imagine a lawnmower that could do trees in a swatch a quarter mile wide or better, just a mowed line from horizon to horizon, ridgeline to ridgeline, everything in the path *splintered*. Nature can be truly awesome and it makes you pretty humble.

Semi-OT: GoogleEarth and Greensburg

wowbagger
Fri Aug 01 07:48:11 -0700 2008
 manage

I found out last night that Google had finally fixed the bug in GoogleEarth 4.3 that required SSE2 support in Linux (but NOT in Windows....). I updated GE and start playing around.

I found they have an overlay for Greensburg, KS that shows high-rez before and after pictures.

Jaw-dropping is the only phrase that comes to mind.

Recent New England Tornado to be Studied for Years
mengel
Fri Aug 01 08:08:52 -0700 2008
 manage

Years ago my family moved near Xenia, Ohio.  One afternoon my friends and I had bicyled into Xenia, and grabbed some food at the drive through (we thought this was great fun on bicycles), and stopped in an open, grassy block in the middle of town to eat; thinking it was a park.  As we sat, and ate, and talked, I noticed  a bit of sidewalk that formed a T, came over to a set of 3 steps, and ended, abruptly.  A little further down was another, similar feature.  It took a minute for it to sink in, that those bits of sidewalk used to go to  houses, and we were sitting, laughing, and eating where the tornado had come through a few years earlier, and this was a formerly residential block which was now just perfectly flat. 

We got kind of quiet after that realization, finished our food, and rode on.

 

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