Elaine Meinel Supkis
Super Typhoon, Ioke, is now definitely heading north into cooler waters and might strike northern Japan rather than banging right into China or the Tokyo sector of Japan. Asia has been battered by a series of violent typhoons this last two years. One with 50 foot waves would have been a tremendous blow.
The Weather Underground has some good maps.
NASA has also been tracking this monstrous storm.
Typhoon Ioke started as all tropical cyclones do, as a depression—an area of low atmospheric pressure. After forming on August 19, 2006, the depression quickly developed into a tropical storm, the threshold for earning a name. Ioke is the Hawaiian word for the name Joyce. Storms and hurricanes in the central Pacific are unusual, but they occur often enough for there to be a naming convention, applied by the Central Pacific Hurricane Center in Honolulu. The last named central Pacific storm was Huko in 2002. Ioke rose all the way to hurricane strength in less than 24 hours.Ioke also performed another unusual trick, crossing the International Date Line on August 27, which by convention means the tropical cyclone was then called a typhoon instead of a hurricane.
When hurricane Wilma went from a catagory one to a catagory four hurricane in 90 minutes, that was a world record. Going from a tropical storm to a catagory five in less than 24 hours is amazing, too. It seems, all the storms are vying for breaking such records. The swiftness of their growth is a warning to us all. Right now, most of these storms have not done this trick right on top of some shoreline. Except for Andrew.
I remember that storm. They thought it was going to be a fairly low level hurricane. Suddenly, just before landfall, in less than six hours, it shot up to a catagory five.
I have been watching this megastorm in the Pacific for a week. Usually, when a storm forms far away, it doesn't hold its shape for more than 10 or 14 days due to windshear and other factors. In this case, it is being shoved into cooler waters. Just south of it lies much warmer waters. One wonders what would have happened if it strayed there! Australia would really have problems, for example!
We can be relieved this storm isn't going to strike a hammer blow to Asia. The USA has evaded the worst Mother Nature can throw at us but She has many arrows in Her quiver and the fact that we are spared only means drought will now hammer the Midwest and South with increasing power. Hurricanes are bad but only for a few hours.
Droughts are hideous. They grind on and on and on, sometimes for years. Sometimes for hundreds of thousands of years. The Sahara was once a green savannah veldt. And humans evolved there.
CO2 is assisting megastorms---but there is yet another force we must contend with.
Elizabeth Svoboda
for National Geographic News
August 29, 2006
In the ongoing debate over global warming, climatologists usually peg carbon dioxide as the most dangerous of the atmosphere's heat- trapping gases.But methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, might be even more problematic.
According to Tessa Hill, a geologist at the University of California, Davis, more methane is released into the atmosphere from ocean deposits during periods of warming than previously thought.
This expelled methane increases temperatures and releases more methane, creating a positive feedback loop.
The methane breathers on alien planets probably would love to see this planet's atmosphre become more pleasant for them. For us, this is another worry. The oceans hold an amazing amount of methane locked away in the lower depths. Some humans dream of tapping this and using it. It reminds me of the drilling in Indonesia for gas that ended up releasing a massive amount of very hot mud.
Unlocking Nature's box can release all sorts of unexpected Pandorian demons.
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