Thanks to CASI Members MAWS for forwarding these articles.
As for the tornado modification article, my professor in college always
reminded me that it's hard to risk modifying the weather - an
experiment 20 or 30 years ago in which they attempted to kill a
hurricane (can't remember how, cloud seeding or explosions or whatever)
failed when after the modification the hurricane turned around and
headed for the US Coast. Whether the turn of course had anything to do
with the modification we'll never know but an accident like that put a
cap on Weather Modification for a number of years you can bet. ;)
Mid-Atlantic Weather Station (General List) -
http://members.aol.com/herb0412/index.html
"Tornadoes Zapped from Space"
(Source: Discovery Online)
--------------------------
Scientists say they've come up with a way to "kill" tornadoes; zap the
storms that produce them with microwave beams shot from space. The Dick
Tracy-like idea uses microwaves shot from a space-based platform to
"kill"
twisters. The Dick Tracy-like idea uses microwaves shot from a
space-based
platform to "kill" twisters.
Lyle Jenkins, a former NASA engineer, and Bernard Eastlund, of Eastlund
Scientific Enterprises Corp., introduced the idea Saturday at the
International Space Development Conference in Houston.
In 1997, Jenkins discovered that Eastlund had raised the idea of
"geoengineering" weather disasters in the 1980s. Jenkins then convinced
the European Space Agency to hire Eastlund to study whether high-power
microwaves could disrupt a tornado-producing thunderstorm, a question
not
considered in Eastlund's original patents. Those patents led to a
controversial Defense Department ground-based antenna array used for
military applications in the ionosphere.
Using a sophisticated computer model of a thunderstorm cell -- called a
"mesocyclone" -- Eastlund and Ming Xue, a weather simulation software
expert at the University of Oklahoma, tested a hypothetical space-based
system. Ming increased the resolution of the wind, water, and
temperature
readings within the virtual storm to 50 meters, much sharper than that
of
previous tornado simulations.
They simulated a microwave blast into the storm at 1,000 milliwatts --
more powerful than any existing microwave beam -- almost as soon as the
storm started.
"It created a storm shape Ming had never seen," Eastlund says. "So, yes,
we were definitely affecting the storm."
Eastlund and Jenkins suggested Saturday that a coordinated system of
ground- and/or space-based Doppler radars could warn of an impending
storm
in time to target and power up an orbiting microwave gun.
"The bottom line is that the elements to actually control tornadoes look
like they might be there," Eastlund says. "This is not a scary Dick
Tracy
beam. What we need is a great deal more study within the space and
weather
research communities to see if this might be true, and if it can be done
safely."
Kelvin Droegemeier, a professor of meteorology at the University of
Oklahoma, agrees. "From a scientific perspective it sounds like it might
be doable, but there's a lot to be done before we understand exactly
where
we have to hit, and for how long."
Droegemeier adds that the scheme is more credible than other plans he's
seen, such as a U.S. Air Force study that proposed using explosive
charges
to disrupt the strong downdrafts that lead to tornadoes.
//end//
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Subject: Article: Brief History of Weather Maps
Mid-Atlantic Weather Station (General List) - http://members.aol.com/herb0412/index.html
"Mapping Out the Weather Not Always Obvious"
(Source: Associated Press 6/1/99)
=================================
WASHINGTON - It's there every day, taken for granted like the electric
light or the paved street. But just like those things, the weather map
hasn't always existed - it had to be invented. When we look at the weather
map in the daily paper or on television, its usefulness seems obvious as
storms and winds parade across the land.
But while scientists have collected weather reports for centuries, the
first weather map didn't appear until 1816, reports Mark Monmonier in his
new book, "Air Apparent: How Meteorologists Learned to Map, Predict and
Dramatize the Weather."
"What jumps out at me was the fact that it wasn't until about 1816 that
people realized that you can take weather data and map them," he said.
"I was amazed by the fact that they had this organization in Germany,
which had a very rich data base, which they did not map because they had
no clue that there was any relationship between space and (air) pressure
and wind," he said in a telephone interview.
It took a disaster to make those maps a regular thing. After a storm on
Nov. 14, 1854, sank several French and British ships during the Crimean
War, weathermen were able to reconstruct the conditions on maps and
realized that it could have been predicted easily and warnings sent.
The result was the issuance of a daily weather bulletin from Paris
starting Jan. 1, 1858. Britain began its daily forecasts Sept. 3, 1860,
with its first storm warning going out Sept. 1, 1861.
Even so, the weather maps compiled from reports sent by telegraph drew
criticism from scientists who said they lacked sound theoretical
background - pressure that led to the suicide of Adm. Robert FitzRoy, head
of the British meteorological office. That conflict between pure
scientists and practical meteorologists continued for years.
Monmonier quotes George Bliss, a U.S. Weather Bureau forecaster, who in
1917 described his job as requiring "a special facility for intuitively
and quickly weighing the forces indicated on the weather map ... rather
than by profound study of atmospheric physics."
Detailed atmospheric physics is a bigger part of modern forecasts, thanks
to the guidance provided by massive computers running complex programs
that analyze and predict what the weather will do. But in the end, it
still gets presented on the good old weather map.
The first weather map was compiled by Heinrich Wilhelm Brandes, a physics
professor at Prussia's University of Breslau. Today, Breslau is in Poland
and known as Wroclaw.
Unlike today's weather maps, those produced by Brandes weren't used for
forecasting the weather. After three years' work, he published 365 daily
weather maps in 1819, covering Europe's weather for the year 1783.
That "hindcast" gave scientists new knowledge. It revealed closed circles
of low pressure that form storms and showed that the winds around these
systems all seek to flow inward.
Within a few decades that knowledge could be put to use in designing maps
of nearly current weather thanks to the invention of the electric
telegraph - a device quickly adopted by weathermen to collect data for
plotting on maps.
"In 1846, two years after Samuel Morse linked Washington and Baltimore ...
William Redfield proposed using the rapidly growing network to warn
Atlantic ports of storms developing in the South and Midwest," Monmonier
reports.
Monmonier, a cartographer at Syracuse University, said he got interested
in weather maps several years ago while doing a study of the type of maps
that appear in daily newspapers. He found that weather maps are among the
most common, thanks to efforts by the government to save money.
In the early years of this century the Weather Bureau produced weather
maps at about 80 local offices, printing them and distributing them
itself.
"About 1912 they adopted a product called the commercial weather map," he
explained. "They were trying to get out of the printing business."
The Weather Bureau realized that if it could get newspapers to print the
maps the news media would handle a large part of their distribution and
greatly increase the area served, while allowing them to cut costs.
Today those maps still appear, often produced in sharp, colorful images by
private weather services, but still based on data collected by the
National Weather Service.
//end//
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