Hello again, welcome back to the Daily Kos Weather Center, where we bring you original and interesting diaries about the weather and earth sciences.
FLOODS ON THE GULF COAST
But today’s diary is about an emergency situation unfolding on the US Gulf Coast.
Incredible amounts of rain are falling at this moment, as a disturbance that’s lingered along the coast most of this week is dumping copious amounts of rain. This is a major flood, with some radars indicating an average of 10+ inches across the region. That’s a lot of water falling in an already wet place. Major flooding is occurring right now. Louisiana is under a state of emergency.
The system causing this is a disturbance that you can see spinning on radar. Pressures are falling, but I’m not sure if it is organizing into something tropical. I can say that if it were 200 miles further south recon would be flying in and out of it. If the system drifts south out into the Gulf it could organize fairly quickly. If it gets a name, that name would be Fiona.
It is possible under certain conditions for tropical systems to organize over land, usually swampy and wet land. It is called the brown ocean effect---you can read the original research here. A press release from NASA can be read here. The concept comes from Dr. Theresa Anderson’s thesis, which I’d love to read someday.
The New Orleans Times-Picayune has a liveblog of updates of the flash flooding.
If you live in this region, please stay safe. Evacuate if you are told to, and whatever you do, turn around, don’t drown! Freshwater flooding is one of the deadliest hazards in the US. This system is not going to move much over the next day or two, and the flash flooding may rise to catastrophic levels. Please report conditions in the thread below, thanks.
Elsewhere the Tropics remain quiet. But we’re just about a month out from the climatological peak of the hurricane season so stay tuned. The Hurricane Center thinks the season may end up more active than one might expect and there have been many seasons that were quiet through July and August only to wake up on or around the 20th of August. Forecasting hurricane seasons is a lot of guesswork and I would consider most forecasts to be fairly low-probability. The Atlantic, Caribbean, and Gulf of Mexico are all hot right now. Under the right conditions, a storm could rapidly intensify in a very short period of time. I still think many land areas around the western Atlantic basin are at an increased threat from storms that form close to shore, like Joaquin did last year, and not long-tracked Cape Verde type systems.
WANT A SEISMOGRAPH? HERE’S A WAY TO GET ONE
There are some cool citizen science groups out there. INFORM, in British Columbia, is one—it has collected reams of data on the plume of radioactive water expelled into the Pacific from Fukushima Daiichi’s damaged nuclear power plants. MarineChemist regularly updates Daily Kos about this.
Here’s another---Raspberry Shake.
A Raspberry Pi is a very cheap Linux-based computer. It is a little bigger than a deck of cards. I have one and I didn’t really know what to do with it, so it’s sitting in a crate somewhere in my house. I found Linux more difficult to learn than I was expecting and I didn’t have a lot of free time to play with it.
I’ve always wanted a seismograph so I googled Raspberry Pi and seismograph. Accelerometers can be attached to the Pi, and those aren’t inexpensive. I see them on ebay all the time. I just don’t really have the knowledge (yet) to solder the parts together and whatnot.
I was surprised and pleased to find a geophysical firm based in Seattle—a minority owned geophysical firm at that---has a Kickstarter for such a project!
Raspberry Shake is novel seismograph that can:
- Record earthquakes magnitude 2 and up within a radius of 50 miles.
- Record earthquakes magnitude 4 and up in a radius of 250 miles.
- Record earthquakes of larger magnitudes farther away but it will miss some of the subtleties and some of the lower frequencies.
- Share data with seismic observatories world wide in standard format.
- Show all activity for the last week.
- Send alarms and warnings to your cell phone.
- See and plot the data from any other Raspberry shake.
There are 7 days left in the project which has more than met its fundraising goal. I’m so excited to tell you guys about this. Please check it out!
For disclosure’s sake? Yes, I am a backer.