In the spirit of that fascinating time lapse animation of seismic activity in Japan last March (or even that 2007 time lapse animation of coalition fatalities in Iraq), NOAA offers this animation of tornadic activity for the month of April. (Things start to get busy about midway through.) It's easy for those of us outside of tornado alley to get the impression that the only tornadoes happening are the ones making headlines about deaths and devastation, but this really illustrations how active a season it is.
(Best wishes to those folks in the path of the mayhem we're watching live right now.)
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What the hell? Follow along with me kids, and I type this as yet another tornado spewing storm bears down on your humble narrator:
Was that a hurrican that blew across the mid-west to nothern state about April 14th?
And another one started over Kansas just after the 16th?
[Thunder rolls ominiously] Jesus.
And we are STILL supposed to believe climate change is a hoax? Really?
For thirty years scientists have been warning us that global warming was going to cause more extreme weather. We had THREE billion dollar weather disasters (fire in Texas, tornados galore and record flooding.) last month !When is the media going to get brave enough to start connecting those dots and adding that three billion dollars on to the price of "cheap fossil fuels"?
Don Quixokie, are you and your family okay?
Gotta be the fossil-fuels we've been burning for the lat 200 years or so. Can't possibly be the high frequency RF energy we've been zapping the ionosphere with for the last 20, no way, can't be that.
www.haarp.alaska.edu/haarp/ion4.html
There was a good storm, some hail, a few minutes after it passed the strong wind sirens blew. Both my wife and my dog were freaked out. After everyone finally calmed down I had to take a nap. Sorry I didn't get here sooner guys. It had spawn three of four tornadoes a few hours before it arrived but passed quickly once it finally came. It kicked up another several miles past us, half way to Missouri. I hope to God those guys catch a break.
I just read that another tornado was spotted headed towards Joplin :(
Strictly for S and Gs (don't need to tell you what those stand for,) here is a live doppler radar screen showing the weather for my area. http://www.newson6.com/category/158741/warn-interactive-live-radar
There's a feature that lets you roll back weather over time.
Update: just read through @BreakingNews that the tornado warning for Joplin is now over.
THANK GOD!
Glad you're OK, DonQ.
Lord, love a duck...what a mess! F4's all over the place. It's not as though we didn't know the midwest and Mississippi Valley were prone to them, either but we just had to go sprawling out over all that open land and build suburbs on it, don't'cha know? If you put hundreds of thousands more people in Tornado Alley over the course of 50 years than were there before - whether or not you believe that burning fossil fuels causes more violent storms - you're going to have more casualties.
<<Retroactive fanswats upside the head for all suburban developers and pavers-over of farmland!>>
And now Cantor says he won't help these victims unless there are cuts somewhere else. He even mentions the Tom DeLay pay-fors, that signaled tax cuts before.
http://huff.to/mBv65r
there is no such thing as climate change! amen
So.
How about that global warming-is-a-myth hypothesis?
Climate Change does not exist. I know this because Ron Johnson and Scott Walker told me in an email message.
I hope you post a similar one for May, to compare. Or one that has April and May together as a continuous time lapse animation. (And they say April is the cruelest month...)
Amen.
I wonder if the solidly Republican citizens of Oklahoma realize that the same Federal Government they rail against funds the National Weather Service whose Doppler Radar installations provide the data meteorologists use warn them of impending severe weather and tornadoes?
Now, where in the Constitution does it say the government has the responsibility to maintain Doppler radar? -- That's the response you'll get from "solidly Republican citizens."
A few of us know. A few of us.
My wife is wrong. She could do it professionally. She loves playing devil's advocate and upsetting my aura and she is so good at it. Its part of how I know I married well.
She says to me "Maybe Harold Camping is right and people are being Raptured up in tornadoes." That stopped me dead in the middle of whatever I was doing.
"Honey, that would be like saying that the chariot to Heaven is a meat ginder."
She replied "It makes perfect sense. The tornadoes sucks them up, squishes them up, draws out the soul, and everything falls back to earth. Like a vegetable juicer."
I was at a genuine loss for words.
She said " Oh come on baby, you still love me don'tcha? Even though I'm so wrong?"
I said "BECAUSE you are so wrong. It makes me know I'm in the right company."
It was patently offensive, even to me, but it was so...ingenuous...I just had to share it.
I think I love your wife. She sounds irresistable.
She, like Mouser, is one of my betters. And she's built like a tall paleolithic goddess and I love the way she swings that thang (that big big butt!)
Yeah, I'm totally down with your wife's theory, DQ!
She is as brilliant as she is offensive. I did very well.