[X] My Assistant

[Palomar]

*Just terrible about LA and MS. I've been following the aftermath and etc. So many lives lost, disrupted. Cannot comprehend it.

-*-

Here's some weather-related trivia I read last evening in The Old Farmer's 2006 Alamanac:

"Hurricanes and typhoons are supposed to be impossible on the equator. Storms swirl counterclockwise in the N. Hemisphere and clockwise in the South. Therefore, there is no way to have one storm that overlaps the equator and has its winds blowing 'properly' on both sides. Yet on 27 Dec 2001, Typhoon Vamel raged along the equator, damaging several U.S. naval vessels before slamming into the Malay Peninsula."

Wonders never cease, huh? Nature has its ways...wow.

And this:

"Spain was hit with basketball-sized hail in January 2000. Globally, more than 50 huge hailstones have been reported in recent years, some weighing 25 to 30 pounds. The largest ever reported, weighing 440 pounds, fell in Brazil."

::shakes head::

--Cindy

[Palomar]

CloudSat & Calipso

*Two new Earth Observation (weather...of course) satellites to be launched possibly as soon as October 26. They're slated to be launched from Vandenberg AFB in California. Will blast off via Boeing Delta II rockets.

They will be launched into a polar orbit, and maintain a close formation. CloudSat has an extremely powerful cloud-profiling radar, which can distinguish between cloud particles and precipitation. Calipso will be able to detect aerosol particles in the air, and can tell the difference between these particles and clouds to measure the amount of air pollution.

[volcanopele]

Rita Observations:

250 m/pixel image of the eye and central circulartion of Rita
http://www.wunderground.com/education/stev...log/RITAEYE.jpg

Morphed Integrated Microwave Imagery of Rita's current Eyewall Replacement Cycle
http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/tropic/real-tim...GifDisplay.html

Another Microwave map
http://www.nrlmry.navy.mil/tc-bin/tc_home2...CT=1degreeticks

[ljk4-1]

When Katrina Hit California

Peter Gerstoft - gerstoft@ucsd.edu
Marine Physical Laboratory
University of California, San Diego

Mike Fehler
Los Alamos National Laboratory

Karim Sabra
University of California, San Diego

Popular version of paper 2aAO6

Presented Tuesday morning, June 6, 2006

151st ASA Meeting, Providence, RI

Scientific version of paper is available here:

http://www.mpl.ucsd.edu/people/gerstoft/papers/katrina.pdf

From half a continent away, we made an unusual seismic observation of a killer hurricane on Aug. 29, 2005 as Katrina bore down on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. By using an array of 150 seismic stations in Southern California and a signal processing technique called beamforming to identify the seismic signal, we recorded a signal strength 1,000 times greater than that generated by volcanic tremor.

http://www.acoustics.org/press/151st/Gerstoft.html