Almost exactly five years after Hurricane Maria left Puerto Rico in the dark, the US territory is once again facing a power crisis. On Sunday, LUMA Energy, the company that operates the island’s electrical grid, announced that all of Puerto Rico had suffered a blackout due to Hurricane Fiona, reports Reuters.
With the storm nearing the island’s southwest coast, the National Hurricane Center warned of “catastrophic” flooding as Fiona began producing winds with recorded speeds of 85 miles per hour. Even before making landfall at 3:20PM local time, the storm left a third of LUMA’s customers without power. On Twitter, Puerto Rico Governor Pedro Pierluisi said the government was working to restore power, but after the events of five years ago, there’s worry there won’t be an easy fix.
As Puerto Rico‘s governor was briefing the island ahead of Fiona‘s impact the lights went out. The governor has already said LUMA Energy - the private company in charge of transmission & distribution of electricity on the island - is on probation with him. pic.twitter.com/YVEnPPcnZp
In 2017, Hurricane Maria caused the largest blackout in US history when the Category 5 storm battered Puerto Rico, leaving 3.4 million people without power. The island had only recently begun rebuilding its weakened infrastructure, with blackouts a daily occurrence in some areas. Officials have tried to stress that Hurricane Fiona won’t bring a repeat of 2017. “This is not Maria, this hurricane will not be Maria,” Abner Gomez, the head of public safety and crisis management at LUMA Energy, told CNN before Sunday’s power outage. At the moment, the company is estimating it may take several days to restore power, and asked customers for "patience" while it works to respond to the natural disaster.
Hurricane season is currently in full swing across the Gulf Coast and Eastern Seaboard. Following a disconcertingly quiet start in June, meteorologists still expect a busier-than-usual stretch before the windy weather (hopefully) winds down at the end of November. Meteorologists like Matthew Cappucci who, in his new book, Looking Up: The True Adventures of a Storm-Chasing Weather Nerd, recounts his career as a storm chaser — from childhood obsession to adulthood obsession as a means of gainful employment. In the excerpt below, Cappucci explains the inner workings of tropical storms.
Hurricanes are heat engines. They derive their fury from warm ocean waters in the tropics, where sea surface temperatures routinely hover in the mid- to upper-eighties between July and October. Hurricanes and tropical storms fall under the umbrella of tropical cyclones. They can be catastrophic, but they have a purpose—some scholars estimate they’re responsible for as much as 10 percent of the Earth’s annual equator-to-pole heat transport.
Hurricanes are different from mid-latitude systems. So-called extratropical, or nontropical, storms depend upon variations in air temperature and density to form, and feed off of changing winds. Hurricanes require a calm environment with gentle upper-level winds and a nearly uniform temperature field. Ironic as it may sound, the planet’s worst windstorms are born out of an abundance of tranquility.
The first ingredient is a tropical wave, or clump of thunderstorms. Early in hurricane season, tropical waves can spin up on the tail end of cold fronts surging off the East Coast. During the heart of hurricane season in August and September, they commonly materialize off the coast of Africa in the Atlantic’s Main Development Region. By October and November, sneaky homegrown threats can surreptitiously gel in the Gulf of Mexico or Caribbean.
Every individual thunderstorm cell within a tropical wave has an updraft and a downdraft. The downward rush of cool air collapsing out of one cell can suffocate a neighboring cell, spelling its demise. In order for thunderstorms to coexist in close proximity, they must organize. The most efficient way of doing so is through orienting themselves around a common center, with individual cells’ updrafts and downdrafts working in tandem.
When a center forms, a broken band of thunderstorms begins to materialize around it. Warm, moist air rises within those storms, most rapidly as one approaches the broader system’s low-level center. That causes atmospheric pressure to drop, since air is being evacuated and mass removed. From there, the system begins to breathe.
Air moves from high pressure to low pressure. That vacuums air inward toward the center. Because of the Coriolis force, a product of the Earth’s spin, parcels of air take a curved path into the fledgling cyclone’s center. That’s what causes the system to rotate.
Hurricanes spin counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere, and clockwise south of the equator. Though the hottest ocean waters in the world are found on the equator, a hurricane could never form there. That’s because the Coriolis force is zero on the equator; there’d be nothing to get a storm to twist.
As pockets of air from outside the nascent tropical cyclone spiral into the vortex, they expand as barometric pressure decreases. That releases heat into the atmosphere, causing clouds and rain. Ordinarily that would result in a drop in temperature of an air parcel, but because it’s in contact with toasty ocean waters, it maintains a constant temperature; it’s heated at the same rate that it’s losing temperature to its surroundings. As long as a storm is over the open water and sea surface temperatures are sufficiently mild, it can continue to extract oceanic heat content.
Rainfall rates within tropical cyclones can exceed four inches per hour thanks to high precipitation efficiency. Because the entire atmospheric column is saturated, there’s little evaporation to eat away at a raindrop on the way down. As a result, inland freshwater flooding is the number one source of fatalities from tropical cyclones.
The strongest winds are found toward the middle of a tropical storm or hurricane in the eyewall. The greatest pressure gradient, or change of air pressure with distance, is located there. The sharper the gradient, the stronger the winds. That’s because air is rushing down the gradient. Think about skiing — you’ll ski faster if there’s a steeper slope.
When maximum sustained winds surpass 39 mph, the system is designated a tropical storm. Only once winds cross 74 mph is it designated a hurricane. Major hurricanes have winds of 111 mph or greater and correspond to Category 3 strength. A Category 5 contains extreme winds topping 157 mph.
Since the winds are derived from air rushing in to fill a void, or deficit of air, the fiercest hurricanes are usually those with the lowest air pressures. The most punishing hurricanes and typhoons may have a minimum central barometric pressure about 90 percent of ambient air pressure outside the storm. That means 10 percent of the atmosphere’s mass is missing.
Picture stirring your cup of coffee with a teaspoon. You know that dip in the middle of the whirlpool? The deeper the dip, or fluid deficit, the faster the fluid must be spinning. Hurricanes are the same. But what prevents that dip from filling in? Hurricane eyewalls are in cyclostrophic balance.
That means a perfect stasis of forces makes it virtually impossible to “fill in” a storm in steady state. Because of their narrow radius of curvature, parcels of air swirling around the eye experience an incredible outward-directed centrifugal force that exactly equals the inward tug of the pressure gradient force. That leaves them to trace continuous circles.
If you’ve ever experienced a change in altitude, such as flying on an airplane, or even traveling to the top of a skyscraper, you probably noticed your ears popping. That’s because they were adjusting to the drop in air pressure with height. Now imagine all the air below that height vanished. That’s the equivalent air pressure in the eye a major hurricane. The disparity in air pressure is why a hurricane is, in the words of Buddy the Elf, “sucky. Very sucky.”
Sometimes hurricanes undergo eyewall replacement cycles, which entail an eyewall shriveling and crumbling into the eye while a new eyewall forms around it and contracts, taking the place of its predecessor. This usually results in a dual wind maximum near the storm’s center as well as a brief plateau in intensification.
In addition to the scouring winds found inside the eyewall, tornadoes, tornado-scale vortices, mini swirls, and other poorly understood small-scale wind phenomena can whip around the eye and result in strips of extreme damage. A mini swirl may be only a couple yards wide, but a 70 mph whirlwind moving in a background wind of 100 mph can result in a narrow path of 170 mph demolition. Their existence was first hypothesized following the passage of Category 5 Hurricane Andrew through south Florida in 1992, and modern-day efforts to study hurricane eyewalls using mobile Doppler radar units have shed light on their existence. Within a hurricane’s eye, air sinks and warms, drying out and creating a dearth of cloud cover. It’s not uncommon to see clearing skies or even sunshine. The air is hot and still, an oasis of peace enveloped in a hoop of hell.
There’s such a discontinuity between the raucous winds of the eyewall and deathly stillness of the eye that the atmosphere struggles to transition. The eyes of hurricanes are often filled with mesovortices, or smaller eddies a few miles across, that help flux and dissipate angular momentum into the eye. Sometimes four or five mesovortices can cram into the eye, contorting the eyewall into a clover-like shape. That makes for a period of extraordinary whiplash on the inner edge of the eyewall as alternating clefts of calamitous wind and calm punctuate the eye’s arrival.
Hurricane season is currently in full swing across the Gulf Coast and Eastern Seaboard. Following a disconcertingly quiet start in June, meteorologists still expect a busier-than-usual stretch before the windy weather (hopefully) winds down at the end of November. Meteorologists like Matthew Cappucci who, in his new book, Looking Up: The True Adventures of a Storm-Chasing Weather Nerd, recounts his career as a storm chaser — from childhood obsession to adulthood obsession as a means of gainful employment. In the excerpt below, Cappucci explains the inner workings of tropical storms.
Hurricanes are heat engines. They derive their fury from warm ocean waters in the tropics, where sea surface temperatures routinely hover in the mid- to upper-eighties between July and October. Hurricanes and tropical storms fall under the umbrella of tropical cyclones. They can be catastrophic, but they have a purpose—some scholars estimate they’re responsible for as much as 10 percent of the Earth’s annual equator-to-pole heat transport.
Hurricanes are different from mid-latitude systems. So-called extratropical, or nontropical, storms depend upon variations in air temperature and density to form, and feed off of changing winds. Hurricanes require a calm environment with gentle upper-level winds and a nearly uniform temperature field. Ironic as it may sound, the planet’s worst windstorms are born out of an abundance of tranquility.
The first ingredient is a tropical wave, or clump of thunderstorms. Early in hurricane season, tropical waves can spin up on the tail end of cold fronts surging off the East Coast. During the heart of hurricane season in August and September, they commonly materialize off the coast of Africa in the Atlantic’s Main Development Region. By October and November, sneaky homegrown threats can surreptitiously gel in the Gulf of Mexico or Caribbean.
Every individual thunderstorm cell within a tropical wave has an updraft and a downdraft. The downward rush of cool air collapsing out of one cell can suffocate a neighboring cell, spelling its demise. In order for thunderstorms to coexist in close proximity, they must organize. The most efficient way of doing so is through orienting themselves around a common center, with individual cells’ updrafts and downdrafts working in tandem.
When a center forms, a broken band of thunderstorms begins to materialize around it. Warm, moist air rises within those storms, most rapidly as one approaches the broader system’s low-level center. That causes atmospheric pressure to drop, since air is being evacuated and mass removed. From there, the system begins to breathe.
Air moves from high pressure to low pressure. That vacuums air inward toward the center. Because of the Coriolis force, a product of the Earth’s spin, parcels of air take a curved path into the fledgling cyclone’s center. That’s what causes the system to rotate.
Hurricanes spin counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere, and clockwise south of the equator. Though the hottest ocean waters in the world are found on the equator, a hurricane could never form there. That’s because the Coriolis force is zero on the equator; there’d be nothing to get a storm to twist.
As pockets of air from outside the nascent tropical cyclone spiral into the vortex, they expand as barometric pressure decreases. That releases heat into the atmosphere, causing clouds and rain. Ordinarily that would result in a drop in temperature of an air parcel, but because it’s in contact with toasty ocean waters, it maintains a constant temperature; it’s heated at the same rate that it’s losing temperature to its surroundings. As long as a storm is over the open water and sea surface temperatures are sufficiently mild, it can continue to extract oceanic heat content.
Rainfall rates within tropical cyclones can exceed four inches per hour thanks to high precipitation efficiency. Because the entire atmospheric column is saturated, there’s little evaporation to eat away at a raindrop on the way down. As a result, inland freshwater flooding is the number one source of fatalities from tropical cyclones.
The strongest winds are found toward the middle of a tropical storm or hurricane in the eyewall. The greatest pressure gradient, or change of air pressure with distance, is located there. The sharper the gradient, the stronger the winds. That’s because air is rushing down the gradient. Think about skiing — you’ll ski faster if there’s a steeper slope.
When maximum sustained winds surpass 39 mph, the system is designated a tropical storm. Only once winds cross 74 mph is it designated a hurricane. Major hurricanes have winds of 111 mph or greater and correspond to Category 3 strength. A Category 5 contains extreme winds topping 157 mph.
Since the winds are derived from air rushing in to fill a void, or deficit of air, the fiercest hurricanes are usually those with the lowest air pressures. The most punishing hurricanes and typhoons may have a minimum central barometric pressure about 90 percent of ambient air pressure outside the storm. That means 10 percent of the atmosphere’s mass is missing.
Picture stirring your cup of coffee with a teaspoon. You know that dip in the middle of the whirlpool? The deeper the dip, or fluid deficit, the faster the fluid must be spinning. Hurricanes are the same. But what prevents that dip from filling in? Hurricane eyewalls are in cyclostrophic balance.
That means a perfect stasis of forces makes it virtually impossible to “fill in” a storm in steady state. Because of their narrow radius of curvature, parcels of air swirling around the eye experience an incredible outward-directed centrifugal force that exactly equals the inward tug of the pressure gradient force. That leaves them to trace continuous circles.
If you’ve ever experienced a change in altitude, such as flying on an airplane, or even traveling to the top of a skyscraper, you probably noticed your ears popping. That’s because they were adjusting to the drop in air pressure with height. Now imagine all the air below that height vanished. That’s the equivalent air pressure in the eye a major hurricane. The disparity in air pressure is why a hurricane is, in the words of Buddy the Elf, “sucky. Very sucky.”
Sometimes hurricanes undergo eyewall replacement cycles, which entail an eyewall shriveling and crumbling into the eye while a new eyewall forms around it and contracts, taking the place of its predecessor. This usually results in a dual wind maximum near the storm’s center as well as a brief plateau in intensification.
In addition to the scouring winds found inside the eyewall, tornadoes, tornado-scale vortices, mini swirls, and other poorly understood small-scale wind phenomena can whip around the eye and result in strips of extreme damage. A mini swirl may be only a couple yards wide, but a 70 mph whirlwind moving in a background wind of 100 mph can result in a narrow path of 170 mph demolition. Their existence was first hypothesized following the passage of Category 5 Hurricane Andrew through south Florida in 1992, and modern-day efforts to study hurricane eyewalls using mobile Doppler radar units have shed light on their existence. Within a hurricane’s eye, air sinks and warms, drying out and creating a dearth of cloud cover. It’s not uncommon to see clearing skies or even sunshine. The air is hot and still, an oasis of peace enveloped in a hoop of hell.
There’s such a discontinuity between the raucous winds of the eyewall and deathly stillness of the eye that the atmosphere struggles to transition. The eyes of hurricanes are often filled with mesovortices, or smaller eddies a few miles across, that help flux and dissipate angular momentum into the eye. Sometimes four or five mesovortices can cram into the eye, contorting the eyewall into a clover-like shape. That makes for a period of extraordinary whiplash on the inner edge of the eyewall as alternating clefts of calamitous wind and calm punctuate the eye’s arrival.
The city of Seville is trying something new to raise awareness of climate change and save lives. With oppressive heat waves becoming a fact of life in Europe and other parts of the world, the Spanish metropolis has begun naming them. The first one, Zoe, arrived this week, bringing with it expected daytime highs above 109 degrees Fahrenheit (or 43 degrees Celsius).
As Time points out, there’s no single scientific definition of a heat wave. Most countries use the term to describe periods of temperatures that are higher than the historical and seasonal norms for a particular area. Seville’s new system categorizes those events into three tiers, with names reserved for the most severe ones and an escalating municipal response tied to each level. The city will designate future heat waves in reverse alphabetical order, with Yago, Xenia, Wenceslao and Vega to follow.
It’s a system akin to ones organizations like the US National Hurricane Center have used for decades to raise awareness of impending tropical storms, tornadoes and hurricanes. The idea is that people are more likely to take a threat seriously and act accordingly when it's given a name.
"This new method is intended to build awareness of this deadly impact of climate change and ultimately save lives," Kathy Baughman McLeod, director of the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, the think tank that helped develop Seville’s system, told Euronews. Naming heat waves could also help some people realize that we're not dealing with occasional “freak” weather events anymore: they’re the byproduct of a warming planet.
The city of Seville is trying something new to raise awareness of climate change and save lives. With oppressive heat waves becoming a fact of life in Europe and other parts of the world, the Spanish metropolis has begun naming them. The first one, Zoe, arrived this week, bringing with it expected daytime highs above 109 degrees Fahrenheit (or 43 degrees Celsius).
As Time points out, there’s no single scientific definition of a heat wave. Most countries use the term to describe periods of temperatures that are higher than the historical and seasonal norms for a particular area. Seville’s new system categorizes those events into three tiers, with names reserved for the most severe ones and an escalating municipal response tied to each level. The city will designate future heat waves in reverse alphabetical order, with Yago, Xenia, Wenceslao and Vega to follow.
It’s a system akin to ones organizations like the US National Hurricane Center have used for decades to raise awareness of impending tropical storms, tornadoes and hurricanes. The idea is that people are more likely to take a threat seriously and act accordingly when it's given a name.
"This new method is intended to build awareness of this deadly impact of climate change and ultimately save lives," Kathy Baughman McLeod, director of the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, the think tank that helped develop Seville’s system, told Euronews. Naming heat waves could also help some people realize that we're not dealing with occasional “freak” weather events anymore: they’re the byproduct of a warming planet.
Last year, hurricanes hammered the Southern and Eastern US coasts at the cost of more than 160 lives and $70 billion in damages. Thanks to climate change, it's only going to get worse. In order to quickly and accurately predict these increasingly severe weather patterns, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced Tuesday that it has effectively tripled its supercomputing (and therefore weather modelling) capacity with the addition of two high-performance computing (HPC) systems built by General Dynamics.
“This is a big day for NOAA and the state of weather forecasting,” Ken Graham, director of NOAA’s National Weather Service, said in a press statement. “Researchers are developing new ensemble-based forecast models at record speed, and now we have the computing power needed to implement many of these substantial advancements to improve weather and climate prediction.”
General Dynamics was awarded the $505 million contract back in 2020 and delivered the two computers, dubbed Dogwood and Cactus, to their respective locations in Manassas, Virginia, and Phoenix, Arizona. They'll replace a pair of older Cray and IBM systems in Reston, Virginia, and Orlando, Florida.
Each HPC operates at 12.1 petaflops or, "a quadrillion calculations per second with 26 petabytes of storage," Dave Michaud, Director, National Weather Service Office of Central Processing, said during a press call Tuesday morning. That's "three times the computing capacity and double the storage capacity compared to our previous systems... These systems are amongst the fastest in the world today, currently ranked at number 49 and 50." Combined with its other supercomputers in West Virginia, Tennessee, Mississippi and Colorado, the NOAA wields a full 42 petaflops of capacity.
With this extra computational horsepower, the NOAA will be able to create higher-resolution models with more realistic physics — and generate more of them with a higher degree of model certainty, Brian Gross, Director, NOAA’s Environmental Modeling Center, explained during the call. This should result in more accurate forecasts and longer lead times for storm warnings.
"The new supercomputers will also allow significant upgrades to specific modeling systems in the coming years," Gross said. "This includes a new hurricane forecast model named the Hurricane Analysis and Forecast System, which is slated to be in operation at the start of the 2023 hurricane season," and will replace the existing H4 hurricane weather research and forecasting model.
While the NOAA hasn't yet confirmed in absolute terms how much of an improvement the new supercomputers will grant to the agency's weather modelling efforts, Ken Graham, the Director of National Weather Service, is convinced of their value.
"To translate what these new supercomputers will mean for for the average American," he said during the press call, "we are currently developing models that will be able to provide additional lead time in the outbreak of severe weather events and more accurately track the intensity forecasts for hurricanes, both in the ocean and that are expected to hit landfall, and we want to have longer lead times [before they do]."
When the United Arab Emirates launched the Arab world’s first-ever mission to Mars in the summer of 2020, its desire was that its Hope probe would help provide scientists with a better understanding of the Red Planet’s weather systems. And it’s now done exactly that. According to The National, the probe recently spent two weeks tracking a massive dust storm across the surface of Mars.
Hope began following the weather event on December 29th. The probe entered the orbit of Mars equipped with a high-resolution camera and an infrared spectrometer. It used those tools to track the geographic distribution of dust, water vapor and carbon dioxide ice clouds displaced by the raging storm. Its orbital position allowed Hope to observe any variance in those elements in timescales measured in minutes and days, a feat previous missions to Mars didn’t have the ability to do.
What it saw was how quickly a storm can spread across the red planet. In the span of a single week, the storm it was tracking grew to stretch across more than 1,550 miles of Martian surface. In the process, it completely obscured geographic landmarks like the Hellas impact crater and sent dust haze as far as 2,485 miles away from the origin point of the storm. In addition to providing a play-by-play of a Martian storm, scientists hope the data Hope collected will allow them to gain a better understanding of how those storms can help water escape the planet's atmosphere.
A recent batch of SpaceX’s Starlink internet-beaming cubesats met with tragedy on February 3rd when a 49-member cohort of the newly-launched satellites encountered a strong geomagnetic storm in orbit.
“These storms cause the atmosphere to warm and atmospheric density at our low deployment altitudes to increase. In fact, onboard GPS suggests the escalation speed and severity of the storm caused atmospheric drag to increase up to 50 percent higher than during previous launches,” SpaceX wrote in a blog update last Wednesday. “The Starlink team commanded the satellites into a safe-mode where they would fly edge-on (like a sheet of paper) to minimize drag.” Unfortunately, 40 of the satellites never came out of safe mode and, as of Wednesday’s announcement, are expected to, if they haven’t already, fall to their doom in Earth’s atmosphere.
The NOAA defines geomagnetic storms as “a major disturbance of Earth's magnetosphere that occurs when there is a very efficient exchange of energy from the solar wind into the space environment surrounding Earth.” Solar winds, composed of plasma and high-energy particles, are ejected from the Sun’s outermost coronal layers and carry the same charge as the sun’s magnetic field, oriented either North or South.
When that charged solar wind hits Earth’s magnetosphere — moreso if it is especially energetic or carries a southern polarization — it can cause magnetic reconnection of the dayside magnetopause. This, in turn, accelerates plasma in that region down the atmosphere’s magnetic field lines towards the planet’s poles where the added energy excites nitrogen and oxygen atoms to generate the Northern Lights aurora effect. That extra energy also causes the magnetosphere itself to oscillate, creating electrical currents which further disrupt the region’s magnetic fields — all of which make up magnetic storms.
“Storms also result in intense currents in the magnetosphere, changes in the radiation belts, and changes in the ionosphere, including heating the ionosphere and upper atmosphere region called the thermosphere,” notes the NOAA. “In space, a ring of westward current around Earth produces magnetic disturbances on the ground.”
Basically, when the Sun belches out a massive blast of solar wind, it travels through space and smacks into the Earth’s magnetic shell where all that energy infuses into the planet’s magnetic field, causing electrical chaos while making a bunch of atoms in the upper reaches of the atmosphere jiggle in just the right way to create a light show. Behold, the majesty of our cosmos, the celestial equivalent of waving away a wet burp from the slob next to you at the bar.
Solar flares occur with varying frequency depending on where the Sun is in its 11-year solar cycle with fewer than one happening each week during solar minimums to multiple flares daily during the maximal period. Their intensities oscillate similarly, though if the electromagnetic storm of 1859 — the largest such event on record, dubbed the Carrington Event — were to occur today, its damage to Earth’s satellite and telecom systems is estimated to run in the trillions of US dollars, requiring months if not years of repairs to undo. The event pushed the Northern aurora borealis as far south as the Caribbean and energized telegraph lines to the point of combustion. A similar storm in March of 1989 was only as third as powerful as Carrington but it still managed to straight up melt an electrical transformer in New Jersey as well as knock out Quebec’s power grid in a matter of seconds, stranding 6 million customers in the dark for nine hours until the system’s equipment could be sequentially checked and reset.
"A worst-case solar storm could have an economic impact similar to a category 5 hurricane or a tsunami," Dr. Sten Odenwald of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in 2017. "There are more than 900 working satellites with an estimated replacement value of $170 billion to $230 billion, supporting a $90 billion-per-year industry. One scenario showed a 'superstorm' costing as much as $70 billion due to a combination of lost satellites, service loss, and profit loss."
Most importantly to SpaceX, solar storms can increase the amount of drag the upper edges of the atmosphere exert upon passing spacecraft. There isn’t much atmosphere in low Earth orbit where the ISS and a majority of satellites reside but there is enough to cause a noticeable amount of drag on passing objects. This drag increases during daylight hours as the Sun’s energy excites atoms in lower regions of the atmosphere pushing them higher into LEO and creating a higher-density layer that satellites have to push through. Geomagnetic storms can exacerbate this effect by producing large short-term increases in the upper atmosphere’s temperature and density.
NOAA
“There are only two natural disasters that could impact the entire US,” University of Michigan researcher, Gabor Toth, said in a press statement last August. “One is a pandemic. And the other is an extreme space weather event.”
"We have all these technological assets that are at risk," he continued. "If an extreme event like the one in 1859 happened again, it would completely destroy the power grid and satellite and communications systems — the stakes are much higher."
Austin Brenner, University of Michigan
In order to extend the time between a solar eruption and its resulting winds slamming into our magnetosphere, Toth and his team have worked to develop the Geospace Model version 2.0 (which is what the NOAA currently employs) using state-of-the-art computer learning systems and statistical analysis schemes. With it, astronomers and power grid operators are afforded a scant 30 minutes of advanced warning before solar winds reach the planet — just enough time to put vital electrical systems into standby mode or otherwise mitigate the storm’s impact.
Toth’s team relies on X-ray and UV data “from a satellite measuring plasma parameters one million miles away from the Earth,” he explained, in order to spot coronal mass ejections as they happen. “From that point, we can run a model and predict the arrival time and impact of magnetic events," Toth said.
NASA has developed and launched a number of missions in recent years to better predict the tumultuous behavior of our local star. In 2006, for example, the space agency launched the STEREO (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory) mission in which a pair of observatories measured the “flow of energy and matter” from the Sun to Earth. Currently, NASA is working on two more missions — Multi-slit Solar Explorer (MUSE) and HelioSwarm — to more fully understand the Sun-Earth connection.
“MUSE and HelioSwarm will provide new and deeper insight into the solar atmosphere and space weather,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at NASA, said in a February news release. “These missions not only extend the science of our other heliophysics missions—they also provide a unique perspective and a novel approach to understanding the mysteries of our star.”
MUSE aims to study the forces that heat the corona and drive eruptions in that solar layer. “MUSE will help us fill crucial gaps in knowledge pertaining to the Sun-Earth connection,” Nicola Fox, director of NASA’s Heliophysics Division, added. “It will provide more insight into space weather and complements a host of other missions within the heliophysics mission fleet.”
The HelioSwarm, on the other hand, is actually a collection of nine spacecraft tasked with taking “first multiscale in-space measurements of fluctuations in the magnetic field and motions of the solar wind.”
"The technical innovation of HelioSwarm's small satellites operating together as a constellation provides the unique ability to investigate turbulence and its evolution in the solar wind," Peg Luce, deputy director of the Heliophysics Division, said.
These ongoing research efforts to better comprehend our place in the solar system and how to be neighborly with the massive nuclear fusion reactor down the celestial block are sure to prove vital as humanity’s telecommunications technologies continue to mature. Because, no matter how hardened our systems, we simply cannot afford a repeat of 1859.
Amazon is being sued by the family of delivery driver Austin McEwan who died in the Edwardsville, Illinois warehouse struck by a tornado last month, CNET has reported. The lawsuit alleges that Amazon was negligent, citing the fact that it told people to keep working through extreme weather warnings. It also makes claims of negligence against contractors who helped build the warehouse.
McEwan was one of six people killed when the warehouse roof was hit by a tornado and collapsed. The family of victim Deandre Morrow has also retained a lawyer. "Sadly, it appears that Amazon placed profits first during this holiday season instead of the safety of our son and the other five," said McEwan's mother, Alice McKewan in a press conference.
"Severe weather watches are common in this part of the country and, while precautions are taken, are not cause for most businesses to close down," Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel told CNET in a statement. "We believe our team did the right thing as soon as a warning was issued." The company said that the warehouse was built four years ago in accordance with building code requirements.
Edwardsville is in a region known as Wind Zone IV, a part of the US most at risk from tornadoes. The National Weather Service warned of a tornado threat 36 hours before they struck, and the morning before the storms, it cautioned of the "likely threat" of "damaging winds in excess of 60 mph."
During the same incident, an Amazon dispatcher pressured a driver to deliver packages amid tornado alarms, threatening her with termination. Amazon said that the dispatcher "didn't follow the standard safety practice" and should have directed the driver to seek shelter. Meanwhile, Democrats have pressed Amazon for details on the warehouse deaths, saying in a letter that the incident "fit a larger pattern" of Amazon putting safety at risk "in everyday situations and emergencies alike."
Tornadoes ripped through six states on Friday, killing dozens. Among the dead were six workers at an Amazon warehouse in Edwardsville, IL, which collapsed while they sheltered inside. The incident is now the subject of an OSHA investigation.
The mass casualty event is likely Kentucky's "deadliest tornado system in state history," according to ABC. The twisters also touched down in December, well outside the normal tornado season. While this may have been an unusually extreme weather event for many reasons, Amazon's decision to schedule its workers during potentially deadly conditions isn't. Reportedly, at the time the cyclone touched down in warehouse's parking lot — producing winds estimated at 155 miles per hour — the facility was not only operating, but undergoing a shift change.
Amazon operates a staggering number of fulfillment, sortation and delivery centers across the country, and as a result, some of them are bound to be taken by surprise by the forces of nature. Excessive snow on the roof of one warehouse in Pennsylvania resulted in an evacuation when workers noticed the it buckling. Two contractors were killed by a collapsing wall when a tornado touched down without warning in Baltimore.
But the National Weather Service had been warning of possible tornadoes 36 hours ahead of the deaths in Edwardsville; the morning before the storms it cautioned of the "likely threat" of "damaging winds in excess of 60 mph." Edwardsville is in what FEMA categorizes as Wind Zone IV, the part of the country at the greatest risk of tornadoes.
Amazon is perhaps better known in media coverage for its punishing productivitygoals. But its operating standards have produced a pattern of incidents where workers were expected to clock in during extreme weather events. Warehouses stayed open during tropical depression Ida in September, the torrential rains of which caused widespread flooding and led to 14 deaths in New York. Some of Amazon's drivers told me they were delivering packages through the floodwaters of hurricane Irma back in 2017.
The Camp Fire of 2018 was the deadliest and costliest wildfire in California's history. Smoke from the destruction also briefly made Sacramento the most polluted city on earth. Despite air quality warnings being issued for the city on November 8th, an Amazon warehouse there did not send its workers home until the afternoon of the 10th.
By far, however, the most pervasive issue across Amazon's warehouses has been extreme heat. Workers in the Pacific Northwest were expected to report for duty during a historic heatwave this past summer which was eventually deemed a mass casualty event. Specifically, a worker complained that some areas of a warehouse in Kent lacked fans, and estimated temperature inside hit 90 degrees. New York warehouse workers also reported fainting and excessive heat around the same time. In May of this year, excessive heat led to a death inside the company's Bessemer, Alabama warehouse.
These are only some of the most recent examples. Workers have been lodging similar complaints for at least a decade about dangerous temperatures inside Amazon's facilities in Chicago, Portland and Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, among others. Even when immediate symptoms like fainting, vomiting or heat stroke are not present, long term heat exposure can exacerbate existing health problems such as heart conditions and asthma.
None of this speaks to criticisms of Amazon's safety measures related to COVID-19, or its objectively sky-high injury rate compared to other warehousing operations.
What's concerning is that, according to the overwhelming majority of the scientific community, severe winds, rain and heat are likely to get worse due to man-made climate change. Amazon, however, has not offered a satisfactory explanation for why it continues to schedule shifts during potentially deadly weather, nor would it provide Engadget with any details of the extreme weather plan in effect at the Edwardsville facility.
“We’re deeply saddened by the news that members of our Amazon family passed away as a result of the storm in Edwardsville, IL," an Amazon spokesperson told Engadget. "Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims, their loved ones, and everyone impacted by the tornado. We also want to thank all the first responders for their ongoing efforts on scene. We’re continuing to provide support to our employees and partners in the area.”
If you're an employee or contractor for Amazon and would like to discuss workplace issues confidentially, you can reach me on Signal at 646.983.9846