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NASA Satellite Shows Southern Tornadoes From Space
gabbo529 writes "Like it has done previously with earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis, a NASA satellite has captured a devastating natural disaster from a space satellite. An image acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) from NASA's Aqua satellite on April 28, distinctly shows three tornado tracks in Tuscaloosa, Ala." For those not following the news, a cluster of tornadoes and close-enough storms earlier this week caused the death of hundreds across several US states.
FTA: "experts estimate insurance losses at up to $5 billion"
So...it's not called "damage" any more, it's called "insurance loss"?
The insurance company's bottom line is more important the the people without homes?
No sig today...
Is it a weird coincidence, or those tornados happen exactly when the average global temperature reaches the highest levels since the last ice age?
I wouldn't feel comfortable allowing a tornado to throw bombs around.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Because A) it's unlikely that would have much of an effect (scale -- unless you're going nuclear, the area of effect would be tiny compared to a tornado a mile wide when they are at their worst); B) just because you can see it doesn't mean you can deploy missiles quickly enough to a location many miles away to be useful. You'd have to have a huge array already in place across the countryside; and C) because nothing could ever go wrong with firing missiles with explosive warheads into the air in a populated area, the only area where you'd want to go to that kind of effort in the first place.
A typical thunderstorm can have in excess of 10^15 J of energy sloshing around in it, supercells much much more. There is no way you could dump enough energy in to disrupt it using anything short of a nuclear weapon. And even then... that heat energy could actually fuel the cell. And because tornadoes form due to massive updrafts setting off an explosion, which would rapidly rise up due to the hot gasses, is likely a very bad idea.
As for cloud seeding: we don't know if it works, there is no way to run objective tests, and it could actually make it worse. Rain wrapped tornadoes are not unheard of and are one of the most dangerous types because nobody sees them coming, except for meteorologists with access to Doppler radar.
I'm not sure these really count as "clouds". You've got a tremendous amount of hot, humid air moving inland (it's been blowing about 15-20mph near-constant for two weeks now here in north Texas) where it meets the cold air on a line roughly dallas to littlerock to chicago, which can't hold that kind of humidity, dumping stupid amounts of moisture (rain) out of the air. The resulting process kicks up more wind. The fact that you end up with something on a satellite photo that resembles something remotely like a puffy rain cloud from space is slightly better than a mere coincidence. You can't "break up" humidity falling out of cold air with a fucking bomb.
If you wanted to go improbable solution, the best idea would be for everyone to go outside, plug their hair dryer in to an extension cord and point it at the cold front, warming it up and pushing it further northwest.
Butterfly in a hurricane...
moox. for a new generation.
And these pictures show the phenomena on a larger scale... sometimes it's interesting to look at the forest as well as the trees.
Mod parent up. His link is to the same MODIS images as in the IBTimes page linked by the original submitter. But as parent's link is to earthobservatory.nasa.gov it has the images at higher resolution and with more useful information.
Oops, not any more. (My heart goes out to all the people that lost lives and homes, but sometimes humor is a way to cope with disasters).
The tornado spawning supercell that devastated Tuscaloosa and Birmingham did in fact go right over my house. But I am an hour NE of Birmingham, so by that time it was down to winds strong enough to break 1 inch branches off the trees, the occasional roof shingle, and "your entire yard is underwater" strength rain.
This is what I hate about most "traditional" news sites -- they tell you the image exists, but they don't say where. NASA makes much of its imagery available on the web, so there should always be a link. To be fair, IBI (as well as the above link) appears to have published the highest resolution available. But for completeness, here is NASA's original:
USA7 Subsets Day 118: 04/28/11
Page for Aqua 250m True Color
Direct link to image (8MB)
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.