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In 1959, Marine Corps pilot William Rankin was cruising at nine miles above the earth in an F-8 Crusader combat jet when something went wrong and he had to eject. Between him and the ground was a big, black storm.
After falling through damp darkness for an interminable time, Rankin began to grow concerned that the automatic switch on his parachute had malfunctioned. He felt certain that he had been descending for several minutes, though he was aware that one’s sense of time is a fickle thing under such distracting circumstances. He fingered the rip cord anxiously, wondering whether to give it a yank. He’d lost all feeling in his left hand, and his other limbs weren’t faring much better. It was then that he felt a sharp and familiar upward tug on his harness–his parachute had deployed. It was too dark to see the chute’s canopy above him, but he tugged on the risers and concluded that it had indeed inflated properly. This was a welcome reprieve from the wet-and-windy free-fall.
Unfortunately for the impaired pilot, he was nowhere near the 10,000 foot altitude he expected. Strong updrafts in the cell had decreased his terminal velocity substantially, and the volatile storm had triggered his barometric parachute switch prematurely. Bill Rankin was still far from the earth, and he was now dangling helplessly in the belly of an oblivious monstrosity.
A cumulonimbus “anvil” cloud.“I’d see lightning,” Rankin would later muse, “Boy, do I remember that lightning. I never exactly heard the thunder; I felt it.” Amidst the electrical spectacle, the storm’s capricious winds pressed Rankin downward until he encountered the powerful updrafts—the same updrafts that keep hailstones aloft as they accumulate ice–which dragged him and his chute thousands of feet back up into the storm. This dangerous effect is familiar to paragliding enthusiasts, who unaffectionately refer to it as cloud suck. At the apex Rankin caught up with his parachute, causing it to drape over him like a wet blanket and stir worries that he would become entangled with it and drop from the sky at a truly terminal velocity. Again he fell, and again the updrafts yanked him skyward in the darkness. He lost count of how many times this up-and-down cycle repeated. “At one point I got seasick and heaved,” he once retold.
After that, it gets interesting. Damn Interesting, in fact, which is where you can read the whole story. Link
Hurricane Irene is causing havoc along the east coast, but some business owners in its path retained their sense of humor, at least long enough to thumb their noses at the storm -just before evacuating. See a collection of such business signs at Buzzfeed. This one is my favorite. Link
Storms recently hammered Sydney, Australia, dropping a month of rain in a single day. They were so severe that this waterfall south of the city appeared to be flowing upwards. If you watch carefully, you can see wind sweeping water over the upper edge. Link (warning: auto-sound) -via Technabob
Discussion about weather is often relegated to the realm of awkward small-talk and complaints about the heat/snow/rain, but extraplanetary weather is a different thing altogether… at least for me. These images of a storm over Saturn’s surface–the largest ever recorded on the planet–are interesting and beautiful. The false color doesn’t hurt, but it’s still so massive that imagining it takes a bit of brain yoga.
First detected in December 2010, the storm has developed from a small spot into a raging storm covering an area about 4 billion square kilometres, or eight times the surface of the Earth, in Saturn’s northern hemisphere.
The false colours on the images mark the different altitudes of clouds: blue clouds reside at the highest altitude with those in red at the lowest. The two high-resolution images at the bottom are mosaics, each made up of 84 images taken over 4.5 hours. The lower of the two was taken 11 hours, or one Saturn day, after the first.
The top two images are enlargements taken from the earlier of the two bottom images. They show the head of the storm (top left) and its turbulent middle (top right). Calculations reveal that the head of the storm is moving west at a speed of about 100 kilometres per hour.
Link | Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI
A rather large solar flare occurred on February 14th, which signals the beginning of cycle of flares that will reach its peak, called a solar maximum, in about two years. How bad can they get? The worst solar flare on record occurred in 1859 and was named the Carrington Event, after the scientist who studied it.
The flares were so powerful that “people in the northeastern U.S. could read newspaper print just from the light of the aurora,” Daniel Baker, of the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, said at a geophysics meeting last December.
In addition, the geomagnetic disturbances were strong enough that U.S. telegraph operators reported sparks leaping from their equipment—some bad enough to set fires, said Ed Cliver, a space physicist at the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory in Bedford, Massachusetts.
In 1859, such reports were mostly curiosities. But if something similar happened today, the world’s high-tech infrastructure could grind to a halt.
Such a flare today could disrupt our cellular signals, internet, GPS system, satellite transmissions, and even our electrical grid. Read all about it at National Geographic.
Link -Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!
(Image credit: SDO/NASA)
New York City got such a snowfall that it even accumulated underground -in the subway stations! Link -via Fark
(Image credits: @dwag29 and @caro)
Imagine being hit in the head by a heavy object falling at around 100 miles per hour. Hailstones kill, and sometimes they kill many people at a time.
In 1942 a British forest guard in Roopkund, India made an alarming discovery. Some 16,000 feet above sea level, at the bottom of a small valley, was a frozen lake absolutely full of skeletons. That summer, ice melt revealed even more skeletal remains, floating in the water and lying haphazardly around the lake’s edges. Something horrible had happened here.
A National Geographic team set out to examine the bones in 2004. Besides dating the remains to around 850 AD, the team realized that everyone at the “Skeleton Lake” had died from blows to the head and shoulders caused by “blunt, round objects about the size of cricket balls.”
This eventually led the team to one conclusion: In 850 AD this group of 200 some travelers was crossing this valley when they were caught in a sudden and severe hailstorm.
Arlas Obscura has more stories of killer hailstorms from ancient times to the 21st century. Link -Thanks, Dylan!
The above video was recently shot at Hietaniemi Beach in southern Finland. It shows dark storm clouds gathering so quickly that people on the beach start screaming in terror (1:04). The last twenty seconds are particularly impressive.
via Super Punch
Stormchasers Chad Cowan and Jenna Blum found this beautiful tempest in July. Perhaps you heard about the giant hail stones it produced- one measuring 8″ in diameter, and weighing almost two pounds!
via kottke
What would happen if a tropical storm hit the oil floating in the Gulf? It depends on the storm, and exactly where it meets the oil.
Much depends on the angle at which the storm crosses the slick. In the Northern Hemisphere, hurricanes rotate counterclockwise, with the largest storm surge occurring where the winds blow in the direction the storm as a whole is traveling—that’s in front of the eye and off to the right. (Meteorologists worry over a hurricane’s dangerous “right-front quadrant.”) So if a powerful storm approached the slick from the southwest, say, its most potent winds would push the oil forward, instead of sweeping it off to the side and out of the storm’s path. If the storm then plowed into the Gulf Coast, you’d expect an oily landfall.
Large chunks of ice fall from an antenna during the Oklahoma ice storm. Look at the end of the clip and see the damage it made to someone’s vehicle.
Source: Youtube
