*For discussion of hurricanes (I'm currently keeping tabs on Katrina; she's been classed as a Category 3 hurricane earlier today and may strike the Florida Panhandle or Louisiana next), tornadoes, rainbow phenomena, lightning galleries; etc., etc.

Whoops...made a mistake in the Subject Line (capitalization). Ah well. Too danged early in the morning.

Doesnt matter about the caps in the subject line - it atomatically removes excessive caps so people can do shouty subjects

Doug

I like keeping track of the hurricane season every year, myself. Quite amazing one so far.. every storm since Dennis has been the earliest nth storm to ever form since we've been keeping records.

*Yep. Two people were killed by Katrina within a very short time of landfall over the Peninsula. At that time she was classed as a "weak Category I"; those folks apparently thought they were safe being out...both were struck by falling trees.

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A cloud gallery with captions beneath the pics:

Shelf cloud.

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Towering cumulus and mammatus.

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Lowering wall cloud/tornado possible.

I've seen these -- they are creepy; also, they can have a "downdraft"-jarring sort of movement which is nearly impossible to describe.

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Wall cloud with tail cloud.

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Supercell.

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Mammatus clouds & blazing sunset.

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Thick wave clouds.

I have never seen these sorts of clouds, not even a photo -- until now. Wow.

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Thunderstorm anvil.

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Turbulent gust front clouds.

Pretty. Looks like a work of art.

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Altocumulus.

Unique.

That's one of the best galleries I've yet found online; they were hosted via one of those "pop-up" attachments at space.com (or livescience.com?) which you can't directly link to, but I managed to link them individually. Enjoy.

Which is a problem when you want to reference an acronym in a thread title. Just try putting something like MER, or NASA, or NEAR, or MRO, into a subject line here...

-the other Doug

Small price to pay for the safety of not having shouty subjects that needlessly stand out from the rest.

Doug

I took a nice picture of some mammatus from my front yard.

Link

Always a good thing to see right above your house.

Unfortunately it returns with a "forbidden" message.

You can't directly link to images on deviantArt. You have to link to its, er, page. Like this: http://www.deviantart.com/view/10835183/

Ahh, sorry about that. Trying again:

Link

*Nice pic! Thanks for sharing. They are always beautiful to see.

The most striking mammatus clouds I've personally seen was around age 12. They were in the SE portion of the sky and looked like jumbo marshmallows stuck into the underbelly of the host cloud. They had perfectly rounded edges and were as long as they were wide. I've never seen mammatus clouds like those since, either in photo or RL. Too bad a camera wasn't available at the moment.

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Hurricane Katrina @ Category 5

9 deaths reported so far in south Florida. She's packing 160 mph winds and continues towards Louisiana.







::EDIT:: Just heard a Special Report on ABC news at 11:16 a.m. EDT. Katrina's winds are now at 175 mph. The mayor of New Orleans has ordered an evacuation of the entire city. They're expecting flooding of up to 18 feet of water. New Orleans' dam and levee systems were built to sustain Cat 3 hurricanes; of course Katrina is Cat 5.

Hi fellow hurricane watchers (from the safety of Tucson). Here is a collection of impressive images I've found on the net:

• True-color image of Katrina taken yesterday morning by NOAA-15
• Close-up of the above image
• Part of the protective covering of the Superdome removed
• Hi-res satellite image from yesterday evening
• NEXRAD radar loop from the last 3.5 hours (out of Mobile, New Orleans radar down
• NEXRAD radar loop showing landfall in Mississippi River Delta region

Im following Katrina too, and are happy to be far away.
This is the the kind they feared in New Orleans, my thoughts are with those in its path.

Before and after satellite photos showing NO underwater .

Wow!

From here

It just seems so...strange. But it is great!

*Just terrible about LA and MS. I've been following the aftermath and etc. So many lives lost, disrupted. Cannot comprehend it.

-*-

Here's some weather-related trivia I read last evening in The Old Farmer's 2006 Alamanac:

"Hurricanes and typhoons are supposed to be impossible on the equator. Storms swirl counterclockwise in the N. Hemisphere and clockwise in the South. Therefore, there is no way to have one storm that overlaps the equator and has its winds blowing 'properly' on both sides. Yet on 27 Dec 2001, Typhoon Vamel raged along the equator, damaging several U.S. naval vessels before slamming into the Malay Peninsula."

Wonders never cease, huh? Nature has its ways...wow.

And this:

"Spain was hit with basketball-sized hail in January 2000. Globally, more than 50 huge hailstones have been reported in recent years, some weighing 25 to 30 pounds. The largest ever reported, weighing 440 pounds, fell in Brazil."

::shakes head::

--Cindy

CloudSat & Calipso

*Two new Earth Observation (weather...of course) satellites to be launched possibly as soon as October 26. They're slated to be launched from Vandenberg AFB in California. Will blast off via Boeing Delta II rockets.

Rita Observations:

250 m/pixel image of the eye and central circulartion of Rita
http://www.wunderground.com/education/stev...log/RITAEYE.jpg

Morphed Integrated Microwave Imagery of Rita's current Eyewall Replacement Cycle
http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/tropic/real-tim...GifDisplay.html

Another Microwave map
http://www.nrlmry.navy.mil/tc-bin/tc_home2...CT=1degreeticks

When Katrina Hit California

Peter Gerstoft - gerstoft@ucsd.edu
Marine Physical Laboratory
University of California, San Diego

Mike Fehler
Los Alamos National Laboratory

Karim Sabra
University of California, San Diego

Popular version of paper 2aAO6

Presented Tuesday morning, June 6, 2006

151st ASA Meeting, Providence, RI

Scientific version of paper is available here:

http://www.mpl.ucsd.edu/people/gerstoft/papers/katrina.pdf

From half a continent away, we made an unusual seismic observation of a killer hurricane on Aug. 29, 2005 as Katrina bore down on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. By using an array of 150 seismic stations in Southern California and a signal processing technique called beamforming to identify the seismic signal, we recorded a signal strength 1,000 times greater than that generated by volcanic tremor.

http://www.acoustics.org/press/151st/Gerstoft.html