Earth Matters

Fall AGU, Tornado Intensity, and More

December 13th, 2013 by Adam Voiland

Monarch-butterflies-pacific-grove

It’s that Time of Year
Monarch butterflies congregate in central Mexico every winter. Sandhill cranes stop  at a small section of the Platte River in Nebraska every spring. And earth and planetary scientists congregate in San Francisco each December.

More than ten thousand people converged on Moscone Center this week for the the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, a hectic five-day event full of lectures, poster presentations, networking lunches, press conferences, and plenty of coffee and beer. For updates from the meeting, check out Dave Petley at the Landslide blog, Will Morgan at Polluting the Internet, the Barometer Podcast, Real Climate, and Journeys of Dr. G from Laura Guretin.


Tracking Tornado Intensity
Are tornadoes getting stronger?  It’s a complicated and controversial topic among meteorologists, but Florida State University’s James Elsner thinks the answer is probably yes (with an emphasis on probably). Elsner came to that conclusion after analyzing the damage caused by every tornado to hit between 1994 and 2006. “If I were a betting man, I’d say tornadoes are getting stronger,” he noted  during a talk the American Geophysical Union meeting this week. But when asked directly at a press conference whether they were, he resorted to caveats, according to Scientific American. “I’m not doing this [work] to establish the future intensity of tornadoes,” he explained, but to establish a method that someday could indeed determine if the storms are becoming more powerful. For more on the muddled topic of tornado intensity trends, see this detailed post from DotEarth’s Andrew Revkin.


Arctic Cyclones Galore

Remember that strong Arctic storm that whirled near the north pole back in the summer of 2012? A new analysis shows that there are more of them than we thought—40 percent more. From 2000 to 2010, about 1,900 cyclones churned across the top of the world each year, leaving warm water and air in their wakesand melting sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. “We now know there were more cyclones than previously thought, simply because we’ve gotten better at detecting them,” one of the authors explained. “We can’t yet tell if the number of cyclones is increasing or decreasing, because that would take a multidecade view.” Read the press release.

Data Visualization AMA
If you missed the Reddit Ask Me Anything with Earth Observatory art director Robert Simmon, you can find the transcript here.

From Facebook
We post items every day to facebook (and not everything that goes onto Facebook makes it onto our site).  One of the highlights this week was a spectacular montage of astronaut photography put together by film student David Peterson. Look for Don Pettit’s head peering out from the cupola at the end end of the video. If you’re anything like me, you’ll find yourself watching it again. And again. And again.

[youtube GOAEIMx39-w]

2 Responses to “Fall AGU, Tornado Intensity, and More”

  1. arby says:

    The Platte river is in Nebraska, not Kansas. Luckily, the cranes know that.

  2. hercules colon says:

    do we need to prepare for any meteor or object from space in the near future?