Inclement weather, blowing dust expected to continue till Sunday

A rare hail storm pounded parts of Dubai, Sharjah and Ajman on Friday night, forcing some residents hanging out to run to run for cover as pea-sized pieces of ice started peppering them for an intense few minutes.

"It's the first time I experienced this kind of hail storm in the eight years I've been here in Dubai," said an Asian resident of Abu Hail.
"I was swimming in the pool on our building's rooftop with friends at around 9pm, and I thought someone was pelting us with pebbles," he added.

The hailstorm forced many to a safer ground.

"I was walking on the road with my children when the hailstorm suddenly came," said a father of two. "We had to run for some cover because we're not used to it -- and I thought it won't stop anytime soon. But it's nice to see this once in a while."

The hailstorm was intense, but brief, said a resident of Al Zafrana Building in Deira.

Weathermen from National Centre of Meteorology and Seismology (NCMS) had reported on Thursday that an upper air cold mass hovered over the UAE.

Meanwhile, residents welcomed the moderate rains in Abu Dhabi, Dubai and parts of the northern emirates from around noon.

The mercury dropped in the last two days of drizzling while blowing fine dust in certain areas affected visibility. Strong north-westerly wind generate high waves lashed the Arabian Gulf and the Sea of Oman.

Doctors also advised people with breathing problems to stay indoors.

Weathermen had raised the red flag on fishermen, advising them stay away from the sea due to the inclement weather, since Wednesday night due to a surface trough coming in from the Red Sea area.

Cloudy, windy and dusty conditions spread across the emirates as forecasters repeated a severe weather warning.
Light rainfall was felt in Dubai, Sharjah, Al Hamra in the western region of Abu Dhabi on Friday.

Weathermen expect unstable weather over a huge swathe of the UAE, with a probability of rain clouds accumulation over the eastern mountain region.

This weather pattern was expected to remain until Sunday, with a drop in temperature likely to continue.

The severe droughts now affecting California and the Colorado River basin suggest that we may be at a tipping point in our ability to continue to manage the water systems that are needed to power agriculture and support Western development. According to The New York Times, many experts believe the current drought that is drying up the Colorado River "is only the harbinger of a new drier era in which the Colorado's flow will be substantially and permanently diminished." Already, the drought in California is threatening the state's water supply - a harbinger of the enormous conflicts that are now on the horizon - conflicts between states and regions, urban residents and farmers, developers, farmers and environmentalists. With global warming now reducing the Sierra snowpacks, whose runoff has been irrigating the country's breadbasket, we could be facing rising food prices and even food shortages into the future. It is within the realm of possibility that we could see - even in the United States - the kinds of conflicts that are roiling parts of the developing world.

How is it that we have allowed a significant proportion of the nation's food supply to be located in a region that is part semi-desert and dependent on irrigation? Why have we allowed one of the fastest-growing regions of the country to depend on a water source - the Colorado - that historically received little rainfall and for whose use there has been little coordinated planning?

It is not as if we were not forewarned. As early as 1878, John Wesley Powell, the one-armed geologist and Western explorer and the second director of the US Geological Survey, submitted a Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States to Congress. The report contained a careful survey of the rainfall patterns of all the land from the middle of the Great Plains to the Pacific Ocean, the land Powell termed the "Arid Region." Powell concluded that only a minority of this land received enough rainfall each year to support agriculture and warned that "many droughts will occur; many seasons in a long series will be fruitless; and it may be doubted whether, on the whole, agriculture will prove remunerative." If these lands were to be cultivated, they would have to be irrigated. Such irrigation, he proposed, would require enormous amounts of capital and would have to be carefully managed to prevent the kinds of conflicts over scarce water that are now becoming apparent - the classic dilemma of the "tragedy of the commons." Powell's revolutionary proposal was that the irrigable lands be divided into semi-autonomous hydrological districts, structured around local water sources. Communities sharing a common water source were to be entrusted with the responsibility of its use and were to set up cooperatively managed and funded governing systems. Powell was also concerned that forests be managed cooperatively. "If they permit the forests to be destroyed, he said, "the source of their water supply is injured and the timber values are wiped out."

Dead whale floated to the beach of Dickwella, Sri Lanka. Video shows you people trying to remove the animal from the beach to a grave yard.

Sink hole behind Fed Courthouse Northern Av pic.twitter.com/aN6BYFCRHe
- John GrelandBPD (@captaingreland) March 12, 2014

The weather in New England has been chaotic over the last few months, but there hasn't been anything that really qualifies as a natural disaster. Until Wednesday.

Several news outlets reported that a large sinkhole appeared behind Joe Moakley Federal Courthouse on Northern Avenue in South Boston.

No injuries were reported and that the area was fenced off as a crew worked to contain and repair the damage. A 30-foot sinkhole certainly isn't the worst this country has seen, but for Boston, that's pretty bad.

BostInno said that Boston Police Captain John Greland's tweet (see above) was the first report of the sinkhole. But Wednesday night, local news outlets were on scene with live coverage.

The mystery appearance of a flock of dead birds in the middle of a busy road has left Ladybridge residents baffled.

Between 20 and 30 dead starlings appeared in Beaumont Road, near the Britannia Hotel, on Sunday afternoon.

Eyewitnesses reported hearing a loud bang before finding the birds in an "X-Files-like" experience, as if they had "fallen from the sky".

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has said it is unlikely they flew into a poisonous air trail as their injuries would be less uniform.

A spokesman said the low-flying birds, which tend to travel in a tight flock, could have been hit by a vehicle or been confused or dazzled and flown into one.

Craig Clarkson, aged 39, who was in Beaumont Road shortly after the birds first appeared, said there were nearly 100 of them, with some lying still alive in the road.

The RSPB spokesman said: "I have heard of a previous discovery of a group of dead starlings, and it was never really established how they got there.

Risk of a monster quake and tsunami off California's North Coast is greater than researchers once thought.

If a 9.0 earthquake were to strike along California's sparsely populated North Coast, it would have a catastrophic ripple effect.

A giant tsunami created by the quake would wash away coastal towns, destroy U.S. 101 and cause $70 billion in damage over a large swath of the Pacific coast. More than 100 bridges would be lost, power lines toppled and coastal towns isolated. Residents would have as few as 15 minutes notice to flee to higher ground, and as many as 10,000 would perish.

Scientists last year published this grim scenario for a massive rupture along the Cascadia fault system, which runs 700 miles off shore from Northern California to Vancouver Island.

The Cascadia subduction zone is less known than the San Andreas fault, which scientists have long predicted will produce The Big One. But in recent years, scientists have come to believe that the Cascadia is far more dangerous than originally believed and have been giving the system more attention.

Event Time
2014-03-13 17:06:51 UTC
2014-03-14 02:06:51 UTC+09:00 at epicenter

Location
33.683°N 131.737°E depth=82.9km (51.5mi)

Nearby Cities
13km (8mi) N of Kunisaki-shi, Japan
30km (19mi) ENE of Bungo-Takada-shi, Japan
31km (19mi) NNE of Kitsuki, Japan
36km (22mi) SSW of Hikari, Japan
609km (378mi) SE of Seoul, South Korea

Technical Details

Steve Goddard tips me to this article in the Canberra Times on May 16th, 1974:

Support for a theory of a cooling world

It has some interesting claims in it that sound much like climate change claims made today. Apparently they detected large albedo changes via satellite, with a 12% increase in snow and ice in the Northern Hemisphere that started in 1971, and continued through 1974 when this article was published:

Interactive image here.

They claim that due to albedo changes which help induce cooling, wind, drought, and rainfall patterns will become worse, much like identical claims made today about the effects of warming. The article also claims, quoting Dr. Reid Bryson, there would be increased uncertainty about "stable patterns of weather" that may affect "food reserves", and he also claimed "much of that change was man-made". Sound familiar?

With several homes threatened by nearby flames, firefighters from multiple departments worked together to get a 100-acre grass fire under control Tuesday in the Bethel Acres area.

With several homes threatened by nearby flames, firefighters from multiple departments worked together to get a 100-acre grass fire under control Tuesday in the Bethel Acres area.

Shawnee Fire Department Battalion Chief Jim VanAntwerp said the fire was in the general area of Walker and Clearpond Roads, which is also the same general area where tornadoes touched down and left so much devastation last year.

He said the fire started in the 17300 block of Walker Road and burned north to Clearpond Road.

"About 10 structures were threatened," he said, but there were no reports of any homes being damaged. The fire crossed Clearpond Road, he said, and smoke was intense as the blazed burned through thick cedar trees.

The search for victims of two East Harlem buildings that collapsed on Wednesday has been slowed because a sinkhole has opened in front of the buildings, a spokesperson for Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a statement tonight.

The sinkhole developed after a water-main break "likely caused by the explosion" this morning, which left three people dead and 27 injured.

"Heavy equipment is required to move additional debris and cannot be brought to the scene until the sinkhole is mitigated. The process could significantly delay rescue and victims search operations," according to the statement.

Nine residents of the two Park Avenue buildings are still missing, fire marshalls and the NYPD said.