Elbert Hubbard
LARGEST QUAKES -
This morning -
6.1 OFF E. COAST OF N. ISLAND, NEW ZEALAND
5.7 OFF E. COAST OF N. ISLAND, NEW ZEALAND
5.3 OFF E. COAST OF N. ISLAND, NEW ZEALAND
5.1 NEW BRITAIN REGION, P.N.G.
5.2 NORTHERN MID-ATLANTIC RIDGE
Yesterday -
11/17/11 -
5.2 NEAR EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
5.1 GUAM REGION
5.7 GUATEMALA
5.1 OFFSHORE GUATEMALA
5.0 NORTHERN EAST PACIFIC RISE
5.9 OFF COAST OF ECUADOR
NEBRASKA, SOUTH DAKOTA - A second earthquake has struck parts of northwest Nebraska and southwest South Dakota. The US Geological Survey confirmed the area between Chadron and Crawford, and Hot Springs, SD, has had two small earthquakes this week. The first, with a magnitude of 3.7 on the Richter scale, happened just before midnight Sunday. The second, which had a magnitude of 3.3, happened about 2:30 a.m. Tuesday. Both were felt by residents but neither was strong enough to cause damage.
VOLCANOES -
ICELAND - More than 500 Quakes Near Katla Volcano in October. A total of 512 earthquakes hit below the Mýrdalsjökull icecap in south Iceland in October underneath which the volcano Katla lies. Approximately 380 thereof had their epicenter in the Katla caldera. The other earthquakes either had their epicenter in the western part of the glacier or below the sub-glacier Hafursárjökull south of the Katla caldera. On October 5, a sharp series of earthquakes began in the northeastern part of the Katla caldera, just south of Austmannsbunga. The largest quake in the series, which hit shortly after 4 am was approximately four points on the Richter scale. A total of seven earthquakes that measured three points or more on the Richter scale were picked up by sensors in the area last month. A few were just below three points and tens of quakes were stronger than two points on the Richter scale.
TROPICAL STORMS -
No current tropical storms.
EXTREME HEAT & DROUGHT / WILDFIRES / CLIMATE CHANGE -
Erratic, extreme day-to-day weather puts climate change in new light. The first climate study to focus on variations in daily weather conditions has found that day-to-day weather has grown increasingly erratic and extreme, with significant fluctuations in sunshine and rainfall affecting more than a third of the planet.
Extremely sunny or cloudy days are more common than in the early 1980s, and swings from thunderstorms to dry days rose considerably since the late 1990s. These swings could have consequences for ecosystem stability and the control of pests and diseases, as well as for industries such as agriculture and solar-energy production, all of which are vulnerable to inconsistent and extreme weather.
The day-to-day variations also could affect what scientists can expect to see as the Earth's climate changes, according to the researchers and other scientists familiar with the work. Constant fluctuations in severe conditions could alter how the atmosphere distributes heat and rainfall, as well as inhibit the ability of plants to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, possibly leading to higher levels of the greenhouse gas than currently accounted for. Existing climate-change models have historically been evaluated against the average weather per month, an approach that hides variability. "Monthly averages reflect a misty world that is a little rainy and cloudy every day. That is very different from the weather of our actual world, where some days are very sunny and dry. Our work adds to what we know about climate change in the real world and places the whole problem of climate change in a new light. Nobody has looked for these daily changes on a global scale. We usually think of climate change as an increase in mean global temperature and potentially more extreme conditions -- there's practically no discussion of day-to-day variability."
The findings stress that analysis of erratic daily conditions such as frequent thunderstorms may in fact be crucial to truly understanding the factors shaping the climate and affecting the atmosphere. "It's important to know what the daily extremes might do because we might care about that sooner." Existing climate-change models show light rain more frequently than they should and don't show extreme precipitation. "If it rains a little bit every day, the atmosphere may respond differently than if there's a really big rainstorm once every week. One of the things you find about rainstorms is that the really extreme ones are at a scale the atmosphere responds to."
To gauge precipitation, the researchers used daily rainfall data from the Global Precipitation Climatology Project spanning 1997 to 2007. During those respective periods, extremes in sunshine and rainfall became more common on a day-to-day basis. In hypothetical terms, these findings would mean that a region that experienced the greatest increase in sunshine variability might have had partly cloudy conditions every day in 1984, but by 2007 the days would have been either sunny or heavily cloudy with no in-between. For rainfall, the uptick in variation could be thought of as an area experiencing a light mist every day in 1997, but within ten years the days came to increasingly fluctuate between dryness and downpour. The researchers observed at least some increase in variability for 35 percent of the world during the time periods analyzed. Regions such as equatorial Africa and Asia experienced the greatest increase in the frequency of extreme conditions, with erratic shifts in weather occurring throughout the year. In more temperate regions such as the United States, day-to-day variability increased to a lesser degree and typically only seasonally. In the northeastern United States, for instance, sudden jumps from sunny to bleak days became more common during the winter from 1984 to 2007.
In the 23 years that sunshine variability rose for tropical Africa and Asia, those areas also showed a greater occurrence of towering thunderstorm clouds known as convective clouds. Tropical areas that experienced more and more unbalanced levels of sunshine and rainfall witnessed an in-kind jump in convective cloud cover. The findings could indicate that the sunnier days accelerate the rate at which water evaporates then condenses in the atmosphere to form rain, thus producing heavy rain more often. The atmosphere is a fluid, and when severe weather such as a convective-cloud thunderstorm "punches" it, the disturbance spreads around the world. Weather that increasingly leaps from one extreme condition to another in short periods of time affects the equilibrium of heat and rain worldwide. "Storms are violent and significant events — while they are individually localized, their disturbance radiates. Wherever it's raining heavily, especially, or variably is where the atmosphere is being punched. As soon as it is punched somewhere in the tropics it starts waves that go all the way around the planet. So we can see waves coming off the west Pacific convection activity and going all the way around the planet in the tropical band. The atmosphere also has the job of moving heat from the equator to the poles, and storms are the source of heat to the atmosphere, so if a storm's location or its timing or its seasonality is altered, that's going to change how the circulation responds." These sweeping atmospheric changes can interact with local conditions such as temperature and topography to skew regular weather patterns. "Signals end up going over the whole globe, and whether they're important in a particular place or not depends on what else is happening. But you can think of storms as being the disturbances in an otherwise smooth flow. That's why this is a climate issue even though we're talking about daily variability in specific locations...Increases in variability diminish the efficiency with which plants and trees remove carbon dioxide from the air. All of a sudden, the land and the atmosphere are no longer in balance, and plants cannot absorb levels of carbon dioxide proportional to the concentrations in the environment. That will affect everybody."
