Is tornado ally shifting east

As I sit at my computer tonight and watch reports of tornadoes touching down along the southeast, I have to wonder if Harold Brooks and Victor Gensini might be on to something.

Their paper titled “Spatial trends in United States tornado frequency” has a lot of data that supports a shift of tornado ally toward the east with a decrease in the Plains. If this trend continues, states like Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, and Kentucky will see a lot more activity in the future.

I guess time will tell. Regardless we should all be prepared for tornado activity because they can touch down in any state if conditions are right.

A tornado forms when a mesocyclone lowers below a cloud base and begins to take in cool, moist air from the downdraft region of a storm. The convergence of warm air in the updraft and cool air causes a rotating wall cloud to form. Then an area of quickly descending air known as the rear flank downdraft (RFD) focuses the mesocyclone’s base, causing it to draw air from a smaller and smaller area on the ground. As the updraft intensifies, it creates an area of low pressure at the surface. This pulls the focused mesocyclone down, in the form of a visible condensation funnel. As the funnel descends, the RFD also reaches the ground, fanning outward and creating a gust front that can cause severe damage a considerable distance from the tornado. Usually, the funnel cloud begins causing damage on the ground (becoming a tornado) within a few minutes of the RFD reaching the ground.

Microfiction – The last game

Game day, the players are running out onto the field for Super Bowl LIII. The fans are screaming for their favorite team, and the excitement is intensifying.

Outside 200 mini-drones have been released from multiple vehicles staged around the city. As they close in on Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium, they merge together to form 20 attack squadrons.

The first squadrons hit the front glass of the stadium with one mini explosion after another, clearing the way for the rest to fly through. Inside they release their deadly cargo over the fans. Panicked, they rush the exits killing more people as they flee. A sports center reporter describing the event is spotted by one last drone. It heads straight for him and detonates.

Game day is over. The remaining drones fly out of the stadium and into the city streets, causing more chaos until their batteries die.

You wake up to realize your house is on fire

You wake up to realize your house is on fire. Immediately you throw off the covers and run for the front door to escape. You’re almost there, a few more steps, and you’re out, but you fall to the floor, overcome by smoke.

A firefighter pushes on the door, trying to enter but finds its block. He finally opens it enough to squeeze through; smoke and flames race out the door above him. Finding your lifeless body, he drags you outside and begins CPR with the medic crew that just pulled up. Other firefighters continue to battle the blaze.

Your neighbors look on in shock, and the cries of your wife, who has just arrived home from work, can be heard in the distance as a police officer briefs her of the situation.

The exhausted firefighter kneels to the ground and unzips his bunker gear to cool off as the ambulance drives away with your body. A scene that could have been prevented if you had remained calm and crawled out of your house instead of running. There was very little smoke at floor level, but you panicked and forgot this simple rule:

If you awake to an alarm or suspect fire at night, roll out of bed, and crawl, there will be less smoke and heat at floor level.

On average, seven people die in U.S. home fires per day.

Smoking is the leading cause of civilian home fire deaths. Heating equipment is the second most common cause of home fires and fire injuries and the third leading cause of fire deaths.

Smoke alarms save lives.

Make sure you have a working smoke detector in your home.

Don’t be the next victim, remain calm, and survive.

Many disaster stories have been passed down through history.

Many disaster stories have been passed down through history. In this post, we look at some Australian Aborigine stories.

The Luritja people, native to the remote deserts of central Australia, once told a story about an impact disaster:

“A fire devil coming down from the Sun, crashing into Earth and killing everything in the vicinity.”

The Gunditjmara people describe a tsunami:

“A gigantic wave coming very far inland and killing everybody except those who were upon the mountaintops.”

In The Legend of The Great Flood, a drought is described in the time before the flood:

“In the dream-time, a terrible drought swept across the land. The leaves of the trees turned brown and fell from the branches, the flowers drooped their heads and died, and the green grass withered as though the spirit from the barren mountain had breathed upon it with a breath of fire. When the hot wind blew, the dead reeds rattled in the river bed, and the burning sands shimmered like a silver lagoon.

All the water had left the rippling creeks, and deep, still water holes. In the clear blue sky, the sun was a mass of molten gold; the clouds no longer drifted across the hills, and the only darkness that fell across the land was the shadow of night and death.”

In a story about Lake Euramoo, an earthquake is described:

“The broken taboo angered the rainbow serpent Yamany, the dominant spirit of the area … As a result, ‘the camping-place began to change, the earth under the camp roaring like thunder. The wind started to blow down as if a cyclone were coming. The camping-place began to twist and crack. While this was happening, there was in the sky a red cloud, of a hue never seen before. The people tried to run from side to side but were swallowed by a crack which opened in the ground’…”

The Gugu Badhun Aboriginal people tell a story of an enormous volcanic eruption.

“Once upon a time, a huge explosion rocked the land, and a massive crater appeared in the ground. A cloud of malicious dust filled the air, and when people wandered into it, they disappeared forever. The air was so hot that along the waterfronts, the ground appeared to be on fire.”

And finally, this Aboriginal story tells of a time when the sea was lower.

“In the beginning, as far back as we remember, our home islands were not islands at all as they are today. They were part of a peninsula that jutted out from the mainland, and we roamed freely throughout the land without having to get in a boat like we do today. Then Garnguur, the seagull woman, took her raft and dragged it back and forth across the neck of the peninsula, letting the sea pour in and making our homes into islands.”

These stories were once thought to be myths, but science is proving them to be true. Humans have been living with disasters since the beginning of time, and we will continue to live with them.

Learn to live with nature, and you will survive; fight it, and you will lose.

An atmospheric dust veil and the hunger years

An atmospheric dust veil covered the earth in the years 535/536 CE and brought about death and hunger to millions.

It is believed to have been caused by volcanic eruptions in the tropics or an impact disaster from space; regardless, the devastation had to be overcome by those with the will to survive.

The words from those who wrote about it tell a story we may live someday if another deathly dust veil encircles our world.

The Byzantine historian Procopius recorded of 536, in his report on the wars with the Vandals.

“For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during this whole year, and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear nor such as it is accustomed to shed. And from the time when this thing happened, men were free neither from war nor pestilence nor any other thing leading to death.”

As you can see in his description, the people at that time had resorted to waring with one another as a pestilence (a fatal epidemic disease) fell upon them. Starvation was pushing them to their moral limits just as we would be today.

Michael the Syrian, of Byzantine, also wrote of the veil.

“The sun was eclipsed for 18 months. For only three hours in the morning, it would give light, but a light that resembled neither day nor night.”

In his writings, we see that the sun only gave light for three hours in the morning. Can you imagine the fear most people would have felt not knowing the cause fo their suffering?

A cloud, dust veil, or dry fog that darkened the earth for a year was mention by others, saying that it caused cold, drought, and food shortages.

Michael the Syrian also wrote.

“During that year, fruit did not reach the point of maturity, and all the land became as though transformed into something half-alive, or like someone suffering from a long illness.”

The Gaelic Irish Annals recorded the following:

“A failure of bread in the year 536 AD” – the Annals of Ulster

“A failure of bread from the years 536–539 AD” – the Annals of Inisfallen

It also snowed in August of that year, in China, which ruined crops in Qingzhou and other provinces, and a dense, dry fog entered Eygpt.

The 536 events and ensuing famine may have also been responsible for the deposition of hoards of gold by Scandinavian elites at the end of the Migration Period. Their gold appears to no longer hold value for them as they sacrifice it to appease the gods trying to get the sunlight back.

Nothing was more important to them than the life-giving rays of the sun.

Other various historical sources from the sixth century describe “a sun that hardly cast a shadow.”

Some today believe this event could be the source of the Legend of the Fimbuwinter, the harsh, cold period of three years of winter without a summer that takes place before Ragnarock, the twilight of the gods–the end of the known world and the birth of a new era.

I can certainly believe the people of that time must have felt as if they were reborn into a new era after the veil lifted returning life to the planet.

Will the sun be taken away from us again one day? I don’t know, but there is no need to live in fear because there is nothing we can do about it. What we can do is live a prepared life and strengthen our minds to become the survivors of our time.

A volcanic winter is a reduction in global temperatures caused by volcanic ash and droplets of sulfuric acid and water obscuring the sun and raising earth’s albedo (increasing the reflection of solar radiation) after a massive, particularly explosive volcanic eruption. Long-term cooling effects are primarily dependent upon the injection of sulfur gasses into the stratosphere, where they undergo a series of reactions to create sulfuric acid, which can nucleate and form aerosols. Volcanic stratospheric aerosols cool the surface by reflecting solar radiation and warm the stratosphere by absorbing terrestrial radiation. The variations in atmospheric warming and cooling results in changes in tropospheric and stratospheric circulation. Reference Wikipedia.com

An earthquake scale

An earthquake scale can give you a general idea of how much damage an earthquake is capable of.

Earthquake Magnitude Scale
2.5 or less is usually not felt but can be recorded by a seismograph.
2.5 to 5.4 is often felt but only causes minor damage.
5.5 to 6.0 can cause slight damage to buildings
6.1 to 6.9 can cause a lot of damage in a very populated area.
7.0 to 7.9 is a major earthquake with serious damage.
8.0 or higher is a great earthquake that can destroy entire communities.

As you can see, anything under 5.0 will not cause that much damage.

Surviving a catastrophic power outage

You may have read other articles about a December report put out by The President’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC), which is composed of senior executives from industry, state, and local government who own and operate the critical infrastructure essential to our modern life. In those articles, you may feel they sensationalized the report, so I am going to write this article using only quoted material from the report. If, after reading them, you are still interested, you can read the full report here.

“We found that existing national plans, response resources, and coordination strategies would be outmatched by a catastrophic power outage.”

“Imagin an outage that stretches beyond days and weeks to months or years, and affects large swaths of the country.”

“The scale of the event—stretching across states and regions, affecting tens of millions of people—would exceed and exhaust mutual aid resources and capabilities.”

“A catastrophic power outage may occur with little or no notice and result from myriad types of scenarios: for example, a sophisticated cyber-physical attack resulting in severe physical infrastructure damage; attacks timed to follow and exacerbate a major natural disaster; a large-scale wildfire, earthquake, or geomagnetic event; or a series of attacks or events over a short period of time that compound to create significant physical damage to our nation’s infrastructure.”

“Ultimately, all events, from small to large disasters, are local. This means that those closest to impacted areas are the true first responders during an emergency or disaster—from individuals to families to neighbors and local communities.”

“There remains an ongoing myth that the federal government will be able to provide assistance and resources directly after an event to help with response, and that is not always the case.”

I will stop here, the quotes speak for themselves.

We should all be prepared to live without power, and we should also be ready to deal with those who are not, which, in my opinion, will be the more significant threat.

A little southern snowstorm

Today I noticed people moving through the aisles of my local grocery store with concerned looks on their faces. I even overheard some of them chattering about a significant event that was to take place this weekend but did not catch what it was.

Had I missed something important on the news this morning. Puzzled, I quickly scanned the news app on my phone, but could only find a weather report about snow. Then it hit me, I live In the south and snow is a significant event, but not in a bad way. We like to get all fired up and pretend we’re in real danger. And those overblown newscasts, well that’s just icing on the cake. If we’re lucky, the governor will even call for a state of emergency and have a special news conference to tell us the roads are going to be slick. Ooooh scary, Thanks, governor.

As that storm approaches, we’ll watch its path as if it were a hurricane track saying things like, “I sure hope it misses us,” while secretly hoping for a blizzard so we can buy an “I Survived Snowmageddon” t-shirt.

When it does begin to snow, grandma will say, “Here it comes, boys.” Then after about ten minutes or so, some sleet will start hitting the roof, and uncle Bobby will chime in with a, “See, I told you it was going to be an ice storm.” Then things will really take a turn for the worse as the sound of rain takes its place. And we all know what comes after the sound of rain when the kids been expecting some snow; that’s right, crying like you ain’t never heard before.

So, let’s all pray for snow this weekend for the kids to play in. And if it doesn’t, let’s all pray for the weatherman. Bless his heart, he tried.

Yellowstone, holy crap on a stick

Talking about a Yellowstone Volcano eruption brings to mind an end of days scenario from which most of us die.

Some people will say, “It’s ready to blow,” to sell a book.

Some people will say, “Something is going on out there,” hoping they will be the first person to tweet, “I told you so.”

And some scientists will smugly say, “Don’t worry, there will be plenty of warning signs long before it ever happens.”

So holy crap on a stick, what’s a person to think?

Well, this is what I think. There is a lot of magma sitting under the caldera that has caused super-eruptions in the past with the last three being: The Huckleberry Ridge Eruption 2.1 million years ago, The Mesa Falls Eruption 1.3 million years ago, and The Lava Creek Eruption approximately 630,000 years ago, which created the Yellowstone Caldera.

So that makes the timing about right for another super-eruption, give or take thousands of years. However, seeing as how we live such short lifespans in comparison, I think we’re good for now. But what do I know, there may be a weak spot in the rock getting ready to let that lava lose any moment now, killing us all. Well, maybe not me, but those sheeple better watch out.

But seriously, there is no way of knowing for sure when it will happen. Still, one day some guy or gal watching it will get to tweet “I told you so,” and another hotspot will be added to the now 500-mile trail of past eruptions. This trial, created as the North American plate, moved in a southwestern direction over a shallow body of magma, is what brought the Yellowstone area to the shallow magma body. And it is this volcanism that remains a driving force in Yellowstone today.

The process is almost sure to repeat itself, and there is nothing we can do about it. Those who are alive at the time will have to deal with it the best they can.

I can be sure of one thing, though; there is going to be more crap in their underwear than on that stick when it does.