NASA Satellite Shows Southern Tornadoes From Space 59
gabbo529 writes "Like it has done previously with earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis, a NASA satellite has captured a devastating natural disaster from a space satellite. An image acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) from NASA's Aqua satellite on April 28, distinctly shows three tornado tracks in Tuscaloosa, Ala." For those not following the news, a cluster of tornadoes and close-enough storms earlier this week caused the death of hundreds across several US states.
Re:Missiles? (Score:3, Informative)
I wouldn't feel comfortable allowing a tornado to throw bombs around.
Re:Missiles? (Score:2, Informative)
Because A) it's unlikely that would have much of an effect (scale -- unless you're going nuclear, the area of effect would be tiny compared to a tornado a mile wide when they are at their worst); B) just because you can see it doesn't mean you can deploy missiles quickly enough to a location many miles away to be useful. You'd have to have a huge array already in place across the countryside; and C) because nothing could ever go wrong with firing missiles with explosive warheads into the air in a populated area, the only area where you'd want to go to that kind of effort in the first place.
Re:Missiles? (Score:2, Informative)
A typical thunderstorm can have in excess of 10^15 J of energy sloshing around in it, supercells much much more. There is no way you could dump enough energy in to disrupt it using anything short of a nuclear weapon. And even then... that heat energy could actually fuel the cell. And because tornadoes form due to massive updrafts setting off an explosion, which would rapidly rise up due to the hot gasses, is likely a very bad idea.
As for cloud seeding: we don't know if it works, there is no way to run objective tests, and it could actually make it worse. Rain wrapped tornadoes are not unheard of and are one of the most dangerous types because nobody sees them coming, except for meteorologists with access to Doppler radar.
Re:Meh. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Global warming? (Score:3, Informative)
It's a pretty weird coincidence that more and stronger tornadoes have happened many times between the last Ice Age and now.
We're getting better at noticing them because the people inhabiting the affected areas: 1. live to tell the tale, 2. can videotape the event and broadcast it to the globe, and 3. have built a bunch of crap that is destroyed by the storm which they will now spend a lot of effort re-building, instead of just shrugging, killing another of the abundant buffalo and making a new tent like they were planning to do next season anyway.
Re:Global warming? (Score:4, Informative)
Likely. But, a single outbreak will neither confirm nor disprove any influence of climate change on tornado activity. - But that's also true for all these anecdotal examples of really warm summers and past bad weather the head-in-the-sand climate change deniers will come up with.
Increasing temperature and higher humidity will make existing storms (hurricanes and tornadoes) more violent. The insurance industry knows that prognosis already. But for real good statistics we'll have to wait another 20 years. Even then, some idiots will deny it, like they deny current climate data.
Unfortunately, the way it works in the US is that if the industry gets caught unprepared for a crisis, they convince the public that science is wrong. That buys the industry enough time to restructure their resources.
Re:Meh. (Score:4, Informative)