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Bizarro Earth

US: After Storms, a Path of Death and Damage

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© James Robinson/The Fayetteville Observer, via Associated PressA tornado ripped apart a home in Fayetteville, N.C. At least 23 people were reported dead throughout the state.
The reality of the devastation of a storm that sent more than 200 tornadoes ripping across the South, killing at least 45 people and causing millions of dollars in damage, began to sink in Monday morning.

In North Carolina, where the storm killed at least 23 people and put hundreds in the hospital, federal and local emergency workers were fanning out to the areas hardest hit and residents were scrambling to figure out how to help their neighbors or, for the dozens who lost their homes, how to start over.

In the Raleigh area, the police kept residents from a mobile home park with about 200 homes where three young siblings were killed. In sections of this city of about 400,000, several major buildings were damaged and several schools and government offices were closed for the day. Traffic into downtown Raleigh was snarled.

In rural areas, downed cellphone towers and severed utility lines were likely to hamper clean-up efforts.

The storm, which began Wednesday in Oklahoma and charged east for the rest of the week, brought winds as high as 165 miles per hour and spread challenging weather from New York to South Carolina.

Bizarro Earth

California: Dead dolphins and sea lions along coast

dead sea lion
© Jebb Harris

Two dead dolphins that washed up on the shores of Newport Beach on Sunday appear to have died from domoic acid, a poison that can be deadly to large sea mammals and birds.

Mike Teague, animal control officer for Newport Beach, said experts at the Natural History Museum are also reporting that dead dolphins have also washed up in Los Angeles County.

On Sunday, an adult dolphin washed up at 15th Street in Newport Beach, and another at 61st Street later that afternoon. He said the domoic acid seems to affect male species. The symptoms include floppiness, dizziness and tremors; the acid can cause brain damage.

Bizarro Earth

Can a Tornado Have More Than One Funnel?



A deadly three-day storm spawned a reported 267 tornadoes over the weekend, according to the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma. But not all of these were single funnel clouds - some were what you might call tornado twins and triplets.

Storm chasers following the course of the raging storm captured spectacular footage of a phenomenon called a multivortex tornado as the storm barreled through Oklahoma. In these twisters, multiple funnel clouds rotate around each other in a single storm.

The multivortex twister - one of five confirmed tornadoes that hit Oklahoma on April 14 - was the largest, an EF-3 tornado on the Enhanced-Fujita tornado damage scale. It had winds of up to 165 mph (266 kph) and killed two people near the towns of Tushka and Atoka.

Oklahoma is in the heart of Tornado Alley, where textbook tornadoes form when warm, moist Gulf of Mexico air collides with cool, northern air, creating massive storms. The warm air rises and hits wind shear, a layer of the atmosphere where the winds change direction over a short height and create rotation - think of a pinwheel with air pushing in opposite directions on the top and bottom.

Bad Guys

Storm Dumped Record Rainfall On Philly

Storm Dumped Record Rainfall On Philly: MyFoxPHILLY.com

Philadelphia - The same storm system that spawned more than 240 tornadoes to the South brought record rainfall to Philadelphia and other areas.

The rain caused widespread flooding and power outages, and spawning high winds and prompted tornado warnings.

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Japan Earthquake Triggered Smaller Quakes Around World

Magnitude of Recent Earthquakes
© OurAmazingPlanet
The earthquake that launched a series of disasters in Japan in March triggered micro-quakes and tremors around the world, scientists find.

The catastrophic magnitude 9.0 earthquake that struck off the coast of the Tohoku region of Japan March 11 set off tremors mostly in places of past seismic activity, including southwest Japan, Taiwan, the Aleutians and mainland Alaska, Vancouver Island in Canada, Washington state, Oregon, central California and the central United States. It was unlikely that any of these events exceeded magnitude 3.

Researchers noted, however, that temblors also were detected in Cuba. "Seismologists had never seen tremor in Cuba, so this is an exciting new observation," Justin Rubinstein, a seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey at Menlo Park, Calif., told OurAmazingPlanet.

Part of the excitement of the find is the insight it could add into the inner workings of earthquakes.

"Studying long-range triggering may help us to better understand the underlying physics of how earthquakes start," explained seismologist Zhigang Peng at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

Bizarro Earth

Camp Lejeune housing community ravaged by storm

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© John Althouse/The Daily NewsA home along Hagaru Drive aboard Tarawa Terrace II, stands damaged after a tornado passed through the area late Saturday night.
North Carolina - Following a Saturday night tornado that tore through Camp Lejeune's Tarawa Terrace, residents of the base family housing area wandered around in the sunlight Sunday morning examining the devastation.

The storm's aftermath was astonishing: Roofs were ripped cleanly off of brand-new base houses while other adjoining homes were left unscathed. Gaping holes in apartments left dining rooms and breakfast nooks exposed, and in one cul-de-sac, three cars were stacked against each other like fallen dominoes, with another flipped on its side only yards away.

According to Lejeune officials, upwards of 130 homes aboard Tarawa Terrace I and II were affected, between 40 and 60 of them heavily damaged in the storm and at least 10 effectively destroyed.

Igloo

US: Winter storm watch issued for northern Wisconsin

While southeast Wisconsin saw a few flakes Monday, central Wisconsin could see a shovel-worthy winter storm Tuesday.

Forecasters don't have a clear picture of where the storm will go, but if the system targets central Wisconsin, it could bring 6 to 10 inches of snow to the area, according to the National Weather Service.

The weather service forecast calls for possible snow at the beginning of Tuesday in the south. The precipitation should turn to rain in southeast Wisconsin later in the day and could switch back to snow at the end of the system.That storm system, which is organizing in the West, could reach Wisconsin by Tuesday night.

The total accumulation in southeast Wisconsin could reach 1 or 2 inches.

"We'll be dealing with a good chance of precipitation through Wednesday," weather service meteorologist Penny Zabel said.

Camcorder

US: Gotta Watch: Surviving the storm

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© unknown
Fast-moving storms ripped through the Southeast over the weekend, spawning tornadoes that flattened parts of North Carolina. The storm killed at least 45 people in six states, including Virginia, Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas.

In today's Gotta Watch, we're looking at the aftermath of the devastating weather system that crippled the region.

Inside the storm - Get an inside look of the storm that killed 22 people in North Carolina and leveled parts of that state. The damage was so severe, it nearly wiped out an entire rural town.

Fish

Gulf Still Suffering Consequences of Dispersant Use

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© AustrianShroom

For Immediate Release: April 18, 2011

One Year Later, Gulf Still Suffering from Environmental, Health Consequences of Unprecedented Dispersant Use

Food & Water Watch Critical of President's Proposed Budget for NOAA's Gulf of Mexico Spill Recovery Efforts


Washington, DC - Approximately one year after the biggest oil spill in U.S. history, national consumer advocacy group Food & Water Watch released a report detailing the public health and environmental fallout from the unprecedented use of chemical dispersants in the Gulf of Mexico, and called attention to skewed budget priorities for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the President's 2012 budget proposal.

According to the report, the administration's 2012 budget for NOAA - the agency tasked with conserving and managing living marine resources - would include $2.9 million on oil spill recovery efforts in the Gulf of Mexico, while allocating almost $60 million to promote policies that would further harm many fishermen and the Gulf environment.

"NOAA seeks to give tens of millions to push controversial fisheries management plans and promote ecologically damaging industrialization of our seafood. Gulf recovery efforts, on the other hand, don't seem to be the agency's priority," said Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director of Food & Water Watch. "These policies NOAA is promoting - catch and trade and factory fish farming - would further devastate the Gulf economy and the marine environment," Hauter said.

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Best of the Web: Noctilucent Clouds - Clouds, Clouds, Burning Bright

Noctilucent Cloud over S.Pole
© NASA/HU/VT/CU LASP Looking down from above, AIM captured this composite image of the noctilucent cloud cover above the Southern Pole on December 31, 2009. The 2009 cloud season began a month earlier than the 2010 season did.

High up in the sky near the poles some 50 miles above the ground, silvery blue clouds sometimes appear, shining brightly in the night. First noticed in 1885, these clouds are known as noctilucent, or "night shining," clouds. Their discovery spawned over a century of research into what conditions causes them to form and vary - questions that still tantalize scientists to this day. Since 2007, a NASA mission called Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere (AIM) has shown that the cloud formation is changing year to year, a process they believe is intimately tied to the weather and climate of the whole globe.

"The formation of the clouds requires both water and incredibly low temperatures," says Charles Jackman, an atmospheric scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who is NASA's project scientist for AIM. "The temperatures turn out to be one of the prime driving factors for when the clouds appear."

So the appearance of the noctilucent clouds, also known as polar mesospheric clouds or PMCs since they occur in a layer of the atmosphere called the mesosphere, can provide information about the temperature and other characteristics of the atmosphere. This in turn, helps researchers understand more about Earth's low altitude weather systems, and they've discovered that events in one hemisphere can have a sizable effect in another.

Since these mysterious clouds were first spotted, researchers have learned much about them. They light up because they're so high that they reflect sunlight from over the horizon. They are formed of ice water crystals most likely created on meteoric dust. And they are exclusively a summertime phenomenon.

"The question people usually ask is why do clouds which require such cold temperatures form in the summer?" says James Russell, an atmospheric scientist at Hampton University in Hampton, Va., who is the Principal Investigator for AIM. "It's because of the dynamics of the atmosphere. You actually get the coldest temperatures of the year near the poles in summer at that height in the mesosphere."