Napoleon Bone-apart.
**Happy Halloween!!**
LARGEST QUAKES -
This morning -
5.9 RAT ISLANDS, ALEUTIAN ISLANDS
5.1 SOUTHERN EAST PACIFIC RISE
5.0 GULF OF ADEN
Yesterday -
10/30/11 -
5.7 SOUTHERN SUMATRA, INDONESIA
5.0 NEAR EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
5.2 OFF EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
5.7 ANTOFAGASTA, CHILE
5.4 TAIWAN REGION
5.0 CENTRAL PERU
5.3 NEAR N COAST OF NEW GUINEA, PNG.
TROPICAL STORMS -
No current tropical storms.
SEVERE RAIN STORMS, FLOODING, LANDSLIDES -
THAILAND - Nervous wait for Bangkok residents. Flyovers are congested with cars parked two or three abreast as residents try to ensure their precious vehicles are not damaged or swept away by the flooding that threatens central Bangkok.
"It's actually quite a problem. People have died crashing into them, but they think this is the best way to save their cars. The police have no choice, there are just too many cars to move them."
Months of heavy monsoon rain has caused major flooding in Thailand and parts of neighbouring Vietnam and Cambodia too. In Thailand alone more than 370 people have died so far with the rains swelling Bangkok's Chao Phraya River, which the Thai authorities fear could burst its banks at any moment. "There are so many mixed messages. One of the Thai channels on TV says it will peak on Monday, another one says it could last for six to eight weeks. We just don't know what to expect." Schools have been told they will not reopen for the new term until mid-November. As an emergency measure the Prime Minister declared a five-day holiday to encourage people to leave the capital and 20 other flood-affected provinces. "The holiday is due to end on Tuesday but there is no sign all the water has come yet or that it is going down, so you will have chaos when everyone tries to come back." The historic former capital, Ayutthaya, has been inundated and the water has now reached parts of the Grand Palace complex in Bangkok. However, the King ordered that no special measures should be taken to protect the palaces. His spokesman said he wished flood barriers to be erected in the city centre instead to minimise the loss of human life.
Many people left the city days ago, but there are still sizeable pockets of dry land in Bangkok. Residents have been given a number to call if they need rescuing by boat but have been told to allow up to five hours for help to arrive. Small convenience stores like 7-Eleven and Tesco Lotus are running low on basic supplies but larger stores inside the nearby shopping mall are still selling most products. Bottled water is harder to find though. "If we survive the floods the next thing to worry about is waterborne diseases."
Thailand's prime minister says she hopes the process of draining floodwater through Bangkok can be sped up now that peak high tides have passed.
AUSTRALIA - Season of storms ahead in Queensland. Summer hasn't even started yet, but far north Queensland has already had a drenching with RECORD-BREAKING RAINFALLS. La Nina is the weather pattern responsible for Cyclone Yasi and Queensland floods and it's developing again. It's looking like another a wet hot summer ahead. Some areas getting excessive rain, others not so bad for a start because this pattern is probably still evolving to a fair extent. Some of the more sophisticated models from the US and the UK that are based on the pure dynamics of what is happening in the atmosphere and the ocean, are suggesting quite a high risk of rain over Eastern Queensland and a lot of eastern Australia as they go into the core summer months: December, January and February and so on. This is all about risk management. These same models this time last year were showing five times the normal risk of having excessive rain. This time they're showing two or three times the normal risk of having excessive rain. Not quite as high as last year but that risk is still there.
They've had some wild weather around Queensland in the last week or two and now torrential rain up in the tropics. It's part of that transition phase. This is about the time when one would expect this to occur and exactly where it's occurring as well is right in the danger zone, where la Nina tends to first hit in Australia that's the north east Queensland coast, the sugar regions of Queensland are probably right in the bull's eye of where the impact of this particular pattern can move. It's a reasonable foretaste of the coming months and certainly as they get into summer certainly part of the cause of the excessive rain is due to this developing pattern in the Pacific Ocean, this return of la Nina. The la Nina pattern interacts with all sorts of other weather patterns; upper troughs and waves in the easterlies, and other tropical systems. It doesn't necessarily have to wait for the monsoon to come into play, but of course, once the monsoon does develop it can make the monsoon impact quite more intensive and tropical cyclones can become more intense and so on. Some of these more sophisticated ocean models, certainly the international models, have this lingering on further into the year of 2012 at this stage. It can lower temperatures during the day, but raise temperatures a little during the night.
HEAVY SNOW / EXTREME COLD -
The deadly snowstorm on US East Coast killed at least six people and left more than three million homes without electricity.
Snowstorm damage 'five times worse' than Tropical storm Irene - The idea of snow in October - no matter the amount - was far-fetched enough that when forecasts late last week began calling for several inches of snow, many throughout Connecticut were skeptical. Even the most panicked meteorologists, though, weren't aware of just how stunningly powerful this weekend's freak winter storm would be.
On Sunday night, the president and chief operating officer of Connecticut Light and Power, laid things out in perhaps the most eye-opening way for a state only beginning to move on from Tropical Storm Irene.
The damage from the storm was "five times worse" than that delivered by Irene. More than half of customers throughout the state remained in the dark. Early this morning, the number of outages had begun to slowly recede. CL&P, which had more than 800,000 outages earlier in the day, reported 772,155 at 12:15 a.m. -- still an astonishing 62 percent of customers. Even as the number of outages began to drop, the total early today was still higher than it was at any point following Tropical Storm Irene. At 12:15 a.m. there were 45 cities and towns throughout the state completely in the dark, including Monroe, Oxford, Seymour, Redding, New Fairfield and Washington. There were also outages for 97 percent of customers in Newtown, 92 percent in Bethel, 87 percent in Ridgefield, 75 percent in Brookfield and 55 percent in Danbury. Emergency shelters and warming centers are open throughout the state Sunday night so residents without power won't have to brave potentially record low temperatures in their homes. 45 transmission lines and 15 substations are damaged. Officials said it could take days -- or more than a week -- before all power is finally restored.
"This is THE LARGEST NUMBER OF POWER OUTAGES WE HAVE EVER EXPERIENCED," more than Tropical Storm Irene. "We are expecting extensive and long term power outage. This is a historic storm, NEVER BEFORE in anyone's recollection or anyone's review of history has such a storm hit the state so early." School closures are likely because many bus routes remained blocked and school buildings without power. Strong winds with gusts as high as 29 mph have lead to more power outages. As snow falls from tree limbs, the branches snap back, breaking power lines. Damage to 164 ATT cell phone towers will result "degraded service" beginning this afternoon. Two-thirds of the flights at Bradley International Airport were back on normal schedules. In Danbury, 64 percent of the city is without power. "I would term it a catastrophic situation." More than 200 roads are closed in the area. There were hundreds of accidents reported across the state caused by a combination of slippery snow, downed trees and poor visibility. Saturday's storm, which didn't garner significant attention from meteorologists until Thursday night, SHATTERED OCTOBER SNOWFALL RECORDS THROUGHOUT NEW ENGLAND and left more than a dozen towns either mostly or entirely without power throughout the state.
EXTREME HEAT & DROUGHT / WILDFIRES / CLIMATE CHANGE -
ZIMBABWE - High temperatures spark fears of climate change. Last week Zimbabwe experienced RECORD-BREAKING TEMPERATURES, not felt since 1962. In recent years, climate change has become an increasing phenomenon with scholars arguing that temperatures had gone up by as much as two degrees on average and this spelt doom for developing countries in particular. Some of the signs of climate change, scholars say, are increased famines and flooding in some areas. Zimbabwe has been at the throes of continuous droughts and others claim that this is a sure sign that climate change has set in. Recent flooding in the Okavango Delta in Botswana seems to have affirmed the climate change theory, as the delta last flooded in the 1970s, but burst its banks recently. An expert, however, warned last year, that scholars should be wary of declaring climate change as the reason for the extreme weather patterns. A hydrology expert based in Bostwana said he was able to accurately predict the flooding of the Okavango, as this was part of a 30-year cycle that moved from extreme dryness to flooding over a defined period. The expert defined this phenomenon known as Pacific Decadal Oscillation, as a shift between phases of warmer and cooler surface temperatures half a world away in the Pacific Ocean. “There has been no cyclicity change. A change in climate would be a modification of the cycle, and so far we have not seen that.” So in this case the extreme heat being experienced in Zimbabwe and most of southern Africa could be a result of cyclic weather patterns, but further studies into this phenomenon still need to be carried out. This is THE HOTTEST OCTOBER SINCE 1962, 49 years ago and it fits perfectly into the oscillation phenomenon that has a range of between 20 to 50 years for a cyclic weather pattern.
