Twister Whispers

Credit: Daphne Zaras via <a href="http://www.nssl.noaa.gov/headlines/dszpics.html">NOAA</a>.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

A monster EF4 tornado with winds of 180 mp/h (290 km/h) that caused extreme damage in Harrisburg, Illinois, on leap day happened to travel across an array of seismographs recently deployed for studying earthquakes.

The scientists working with the OIINK array (named for its coverage of parts of the Ozarks, Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky) thought their instruments had been destroyed by the twister. Instead, the seismographs recorded the tornado.

Or rather not the tornado itself, as their preliminary investigation suggests, but the passage of the large atmospheric pressure transient pushing ahead of the thunderstorm that spawned the tornado… one of an anomalous number of tornadoes so far this winter. Some of which may add up 2012’s first billion-dollar disaster in the US .

 Location of seismographs in eastern Missouri and southern Illinois and the path of the tornado that struck Harrisburg IL on 29 Feb 2012: Courtesy of Indiana University
Location of seismographs in eastern Missouri and southern Illinois and the path of the tornado that struck Harrisburg IL on 29 Feb 2012: Courtesy of Indiana University University

In the image above you can see the seismic stations sets against the ground path of the 29 Feb Harrisburg tornado. These stations are part of the NSF’s EarthScope program planned to cover the entire US with a grid for detecting and better understanding and eventually maybe predicting earthquakes. Seems they might come in handy for tornadoes too.

I wrote about the EarthScope program here after Japan’s 9.0 quake last year.

 

 

This animation shows  EarthScope stations lighting up in response to ground shaking following a 21 February 2008 earthquake in Wells, NV. From the video’s YouTube page:

Each circle represents a seismometer and the colors change to reflect variations in the signal amplitude crossing the array. The ground motion begins near the source and then expands outward like a the waves from a pebble dropped in a pond. The circular wavefronts are distorted by the simple map projection used in the animation. The initial waves travel at about 8km/s, the larger amplitude waves that follow are moving at about 2.5km/s.

The amazing EarthScope array has been dubbed the upside-down telescope for its view into the dynamics of interior Earth. 

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate