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Sun

How's the Weather?

Madhulika Guhathakurta & Daniel N. Baker
New York Times
Thu, 16 Jun 2011 06:16 UTC
Image
© Jacob Magraw
Lately, the Sun has been behaving a bit strangely. In 2008 and 2009, it showed the least surface activity in nearly a century. Solar flare activity stopped cold and weeks and months went by without any sunspots, or areas of intense magnetism. Quiet spells are normal for the Sun, but researchers alive today had never seen anything like that two-year hibernation.

Now that the Sun is approaching the peak of its magnetic cycle, when solar storms - blasts of electrically charged magnetic clouds - are most likely to occur, no one can predict how it will behave. Will solar activity continue to be sluggish, or will solar storms rage with renewed vigor?

Luckily, policy makers are paying attention to space weather. Late last month, President Obama and the British prime minister David Cameron announced that the United States and Britain will work together to create "a fully operational global space weather warning system." And just last week, the United Nations pledged to upgrade its space weather forecasts.
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Nuke

Midwest Floods: Both Nebraska Nuke Stations Threatened

Rady Ananda
Dissident Voice
Fri, 17 Jun 2011 04:58 UTC
Image
Tens of millions of acres in the US corn belt have flooded, which will spike the cost of gas and food over the next several months. Worse, several nuclear power plants sit in the flooded plains. Both nuclear plants in Nebraska are partly submerged and the FAA has issued a no-fly order over both of them.

On June 7, the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant filed an Alert with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission after a fire broke out in the switchgear room. During the event, "spent fuel pool cooling was lost" when two fuel pumps failed for about 90 minutes.

On June 9, Nebraska's other plant, Cooper Nuclear Power Station near Brownville, filed a Notice of Unusual Event (NOUE), advising it is unable to discharge sludge into the Missouri River due to flooding, and therefore "overtopped" its sludge pond.
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Play

Kamchatka Shiveluch Volcano erupts in Russia

Armand Vervaeck and James Daniell
EarthQuake Report
Fri, 17 Jun 2011 00:00 UTC
Volcano activity overview : Shiveluch volcano is a 3283m (10770 feet for our US viewers) high andesitic volcano which is the largest within the Kliuchevskaya volcano group in Kamchatka. It is the most active in the group (at least 60 eruptions in the last 12000 years have occurred) and has been erupting often within 2011 sending ash between 3 and 8 km into the air. The latest set of activity started on June 10, 2011

UPDATE: 17:22 UTC : A Russian TV station has reported yesterday from this Eruption with some video footage from the eruption. Russian volcanoes are not often videotaped.
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Sun

Volcano Supercharges Sunsets Far and Wide

Ker Than
National Geographic Daily News
Fri, 17 Jun 2011 00:00 UTC
Volcanic Sunset
© Patricio Rodriguez, Reuters
Volcanic Sunset
A cloud of ash from Chile's Puyehue volcano (map), which began erupting on June 4, creates a golden-hued sunset near the mountain resort of San Martín de Los Andes in Argentina on June 12. (Pictures: Chile Volcano Plume Explodes With Lightning.)

The corrosive and obscuring volcanic ash has grounded airplanes all across South America and even in Australia, but the tiny dust and glass particles are also responsible for an optical effect that has lead to spectacular sunsets and sunrises filled with bright gold, fiery orange, and blood red hues around the globe.

"The wavelength of light coming from the sun is being diffracted differently, and that's what causes the visual effect that we see," explained Jay Miller, a volcanologist at Texas A&M University.
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Bizarro Earth

NASA/NOAA GOES Project Releases 2 Week Movie of Chilean Volcanic Eruption


NASA
Thu, 16 Jun 2011 00:00 UTC
chile_volcano
© NASA GOES Project, Dennis Chesters
This visible image from GOES-13 on June 6, 2011 at 10:45 a.m. EDT and shows the ash plume from the Puyehue-Cordón Caulle volcano in Chile (lower left).

This super-fast animation includes 445 visible and infrared images from the GOES-13 satellite that runs from June 4 at 1:45 p.m. EDT to June 16 at 13:05 (9:05 a.m. EDT) and shows the ash plume from the Puyehue-Cordón Caulle volcano in Chile (lower left). TRT: 1:14 minutes. (Credit: NASA GOES Project, Dennis Chesters)

The NASA/NOAA GOES satellite Project released a satellite animation of two-weeks of eruptions from the Puyehue-Cordón Caulle volcano in Chile.

The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite called GOES-13 has been taking continual images of the volcano from its vantage point in space since the eruption began on June 4. The GOES series of satellites are managed by NOAA, and the animation was created by the NASA/NOAA GOES Project, located at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The animation includes visible and infrared imagery and has a total running time of 1:14 minutes. This movie contains all 445 images taken by GOES-13 since the eruption began.
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Bizarro Earth

Dear Nebraska, US: Sorry about water, but more on the way. Love, Montana

Peter Salter
Lincoln Journal Star
Fri, 17 Jun 2011 23:55 UTC
Image
© Francis Gardler / Lincoln Journal Star
Nebraska Department of Roads officials are building a protective berm on the east side of Highway 75 north of Plattsmouth to keep floodwaters from reaching the highway. The area is threatened by overflows from both the Platte and Missouri rivers.

From his tackle shop near Three Forks, Mont., Rich Gay is watching three rivers.

They're running high out of the mountains, skirting his town, fraying his nerves and converging, more than a mile away.

This is the headwaters of the Missouri River -- and the source this summer of so much Nebraska pain.

But this isn't where the flood begins.

The flood begins higher up, at places like Dark Horse Lake in the Bitterroots, where another 2 inches of snow fell late this week, landing on the 8 feet still on the ground.

And when hot weather finally reaches those upper elevations -- starting next month -- all of that snow will melt and flow and become, eventually, the floodwaters threatening Sioux City and Omaha and Plattsmouth and so many other river towns downstream.
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Umbrella

China raises flood alert to top level, over half a million people evacuated

Royston Chan
Reuters
Sat, 18 Jun 2011 18:35 UTC
Image
© Xinhua
Flooding from heavy rain in Guizhou province, southwestern China on 6 June 2011
China has mobilized troops to help with flood relief and raised its disaster alert to the highest level after days of downpours forced the evacuation of more than half a million people in central and southern provinces.

The official China Daily said more than 555,000 people had been evacuated in seven provinces and a municipality after rains in recently drought-stricken areas caused floods and mudslides in the Yangtze River basin.

Central authorities have raised the disaster alert to the highest level 4, and the government is describing the floods in some areas, such as eastern Zhejiang province's Qianting River area, as the worst since 1955.

Local media said two dykes in the village areas of Zhuji in Zhejiang province were breached on Thursday, flooding two towns and 21 villages.
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Cloud Lightning

Prehistoric East African Volcano Roars to Life


Earth Week
Sat, 18 Jun 2011 18:23 UTC
Image
© NASA
NASA's Aqua satellite captured Nabro's ash plume blowing westward into Ethiopia on Wednesday.
Eritrea's long-dormant Nabro volcano burst to life for the first time in recorded history, belching plumes of ash near the border with Ethiopia.

Air transport was disrupted in the immediate region, and briefly threatened to stream into airways of the Middle East.
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Cloud Lightning

Heavy Rains Kill 11 in India, Six Trawlers Missing


Monsters and Critics.com
Sat, 18 Jun 2011 02:36 UTC
New Delhi - At least 11 people died and six fishing boats carrying around 100 fishermen were missing as monsoon rains lashed India's eastern coastal state of West Bengal, officials said Saturday.

The heavy downpour which began on Friday inundated the main city of Kolkata and disrupted road and rail traffic across the state.

Kolkata received 154 millimetres of rainfall on Friday, the highest for the city on any single day in June in the last decade.

Boats had been pressed into service to rescue people in some waterlogged areas, officials said.

'At least 11 people have been killed in rain-related accidents including landslides and house-collapses in West Bengal over the past 24 hours,' Monoj Das, an officer at Kolkata's main police control room said.
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Umbrella

India: Heavy rains lash Chandigarh, surrounding areas


Mangalorean.com
Sat, 18 Jun 2011 13:43 UTC
Chandigarh, June 18, Intermittent spells of moderate to heavy rain Saturday morning, accompanied by strong winds and thunder, brought welcome relief from summer heat to Chandigarh and its surrounding areas.

Heavy rains lashed Chandigarh and various parts of Punjab and Haryana Saturday morning, bringing down the mercury in this region.

Chandigarh recorded a minimum temperature of 22.2 degrees Celsius Saturday morning, which was five notches below normal. Besides, this centrally administered city recorded a rainfall of 36.2 mm in the last 24 hours.

"We had light rainfall in various parts of this region Friday night and heavy showers this morning. This trend is going on for the last couple of days. Whenever mercury starts soaring, we have rainfall to bring it down. This is due to the movement of western disturbances over this region," a met official told IANS here.

"We are expecting similar conditions to continue for the next four-five days. Though this is not unusual, the frequency of showers has increased in June this time. We are expecting the actual monsoon to arrive in this part of the country by the end of this month," he added.
Image
© Yahoo Maps
Punjab's Amritsar city recorded a minimum temperature of 23.4 degrees Celsius Saturday morning while Patiala (12.6 mm rainfall) and Ludhiana (27.6 mm rainfall) settled at a low of 23.3 and 21.7 degrees Celsius, respectively.

In Haryana, Ambala received heavy rainfall of 63.5 mm and recorded a minimum temperature of 22.8 degrees Celsius. On the other hand, Hisar recorded a minimum temperature of 27.1 degrees Celsius.
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