John Park Finley, American meteorologist, wrote the
first known book on tornadoes (
Tornadoes, 1887). Though some of his "safety" guidelines for surviving a tornado have since been refuted as dangerous (seek shelter on the side of a house facing an oncoming tornado!), the book remains a seminal work in tornado research.
[more inside]
posted by Wossname
on Jan 25, 2011 -
9 comments
On March 7, 2009,
TornadoVideos.net (TVN) launched the beta version of their
Live Streaming system. It's an interactive map that tracks each member of the TVN team as they criss-cross the country chasing storms, complete with live video. You can
sign up (main page, top left: "Chase notifications") to be alerted when a chase is in progress.
[more inside]
posted by nitsuj
on Mar 25, 2009 -
8 comments
It was called the
Great Hurricane of
1938. The tradition of
naming Cyclones had yet not begun, and not since
1869 had a storm of such ferocity hit the US mainland. What had made it unusally unique was the
speed with which it had hit landfall, and the
damage that it caused in its wake. (
60 years on, and people can still recall the
frightening grip that it had on their lives for those few days.)
posted by hadjiboy
on Jul 12, 2008 -
20 comments
"
The storm carried twice as much dirt as was dug out of the earth to create the Panama Canal. The canal took seven years to dig; the storm lasted a single afternoon. More than 300,000 tons of Great Plains topsoil was airborne on that day."
Black Sunday. April 14, 1935.
Timeline, Oral Histories (
Kansas,
Nebraska), Dust Bowl Movie (
part I,
part II), Black Sunday photos (
1,
2,
3,
4).
[previous dust on mefi: iraq, texas, africa, china]
posted by jessamyn
on Aug 26, 2007 -
17 comments
