Showing posts with label extreme. Show all posts
Showing posts with label extreme. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Bizarre phenomenon in California ! 'Giant Rivers' in the sky causing chaos among residents

Credit : NASA
This month, the percentage of California still stuck in a drought dropped by 22 percent in a single week, as the wettest winter in decades saw an onslaught of storms deliver record-breaking rains across the state.

Now, researchers have connected the chaos to a strange phenomenon known as atmospheric rivers - narrow corridors of concentrated moisture suspended in the atmosphere, which can hold up to 15 times more water than the amount that flows through the Mississippi River.

If you're unfamiliar with atmospheric rivers, or are wondering if that's just a fancy name for "rain", they're actually a unique movement of moisture through Earth's atmosphere, responsible for most of the horizontal transport of water vapour outside the tropics.

Credit: NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory


These suspended moisture plumes, which can stretch 400 to 600 km wide (250 to 370 miles), have been linked to all seven floods on California's Russian River between 1996 and 2007, and likely played a role in the 'Snowmageddon' event that blanketed the East Coast in 2010.

All 10 of Britain's largest floods since the 1970s have also been attributed to atmospheric rivers, and late last year, researchers linked them to their first ever mass die-off event, when nearly 100 percent of wild oysters in northern San Francisco Bay mysteriously disappeared in 2011.


Now, scientists led by Duane Waliser, an atmospheric scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, have found that massive atmospheric rivers are responsible for up to 75 percent of all extreme wind and rainfall events on the world's coasts, and half of the strongest wind gusts recorded in nearly two decades.

Credit: Scientific American Blogs

The team also linked them to up to 65 percent of the extreme rain and snow events in the Western United States - such as the storm that hit Northern California on Monday - and say they could also be the cause of 80 percent of major floods in the state.


Last month, a state of emergency was called in various California countries due to devastating storms linked to atmospheric rivers, and just recently, the five-year drought dropped to less than a quarter of the state in a single week, with rainfall hitting almost 200 percent above average in certain parts of the Bay Area.

And the phenomenon is showing no signs of slowing down, with a flood warning affecting 14 million people in California to remain in place until at least Thursday.

The US National Weather Service (NWS) is now saying that storms to come could cause floods in areas that have not been flooded in decades, and are warning locals in Northern California to be ready to evacuate at 15 minutes notice.


"This has been a very active winter, atmospheric river-wise," Jeff Zimmerman from the NWS, who wasn't involved in the study, told NPR. "We've probably had 10 or more ... this winter."

To put that into perspective, an average year will usually only have five to seven atmospheric rivers.


Waliser and his team measured the influence of atmospheric rivers by analysing data from storms around the globe in regions outside the tropics from 1997 to 2014.

Credit: Curbed SF

When they focussed on the top 2 percent windiest storms, they found that "atmospheric rivers are typically associated with 30, and even up to 50 percent, of those very extreme cases", and almost the same amount of the wettest storms, Christopher Joyce reports for NPR.


And perhaps even more worrying, winds associated with atmospheric rivers were found to be twice the speed of the average storm - strong enough to topple even the great Pioneer Cabin Tree - a 1,000-year-old Californian sequoia that finally fell last month.

"Not only do [atmospheric rivers] come with this potential for flooding hazards," Waliser told NPR, "they also come with potential for high impact winds and extremes that can produce hazardous conditions."


While atmospheric rivers are naturally occurring phenomena, climate change is expected to intensify the severe precipitation events caused by atmospheric rivers in the future, because of increased evaporation rates and greater atmospheric water-holding capacity.

So as the state recovers from fighting a five-year drought - that's still not over, despite the record rains - it now has to deal with oppressive storms, and scientists are saying this crazy winter is likely a sign of things to come.


"The current situation in California - specifically, the dramatic swing from extreme drought to water overabundance and flooding - is indeed a preview of California's likely climate future," one of the team, climate scientist Daniel Swain from UCLA, told Mashable.

"There is now quite a bit of evidence that future droughts here will be warmer and more intense, yet will be interrupted by increasingly powerful 'atmospheric river' storms capable of causing destructive flooding.

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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Sciencealert . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Monday, October 24, 2016

Angus Barbieri the man who survived without food for 382 days

1966 Angus Barbieri before and after diet photo: terapeak.com























Updated today 05/05/2020

We can all get a bit hungry if it has been hours since we last ate. But spare a thought for how hungry Angus Barbieri must have been after he went 382 days without eating.



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Most people can survive without food a few weeks, but eventually starvation kill them.

Determining limits a person can live without vital resources fluctuate. Can live without water for at least a week, but if during the food may vary.

Angus Barbieri did not eat anything for 382 days until the end of the day 22 July 1966. In the case of Barbieri there are very few documents, some old newspapers and a medical report published in Postgraduate Medical Journal in 1973.


Angus Barbieri pants Troab


According to the report, Barbieri went to the department of medicine at the Royal Infirmary of Dundee, Scotland, a year before the event, to ask for help. At that moment the young man was terribly greasy ,, '', according to doctors. It weighed 206 kg, and doctors asked him to give up food for a few days. After days became weeks, Barbieri wanted to continue the program. Absurd and also risky job ,, '' for more than 40 days is considered extremely dangerous, but he wanted to reach target weight of 81 kilos, so he kept diet.

Angus Barbieri Tomb (1939-1990) - Find A Grave Memorial

The man diet largely kept at home, going to the hospital for analysis and verification. Blood tests showed that it was functional although it was hypoglycemic, which doctors assured him that the young man did not eat.


Barbieri sometimes consume vitamins during the diet, including potassium and sodium supplements. He's been allowed to drink coffee, tea, mineral water. He said that sometimes put a little milk or sugar in coffee or tea, especially in the last weeks of the diet. It has reached the required weight of 81 kilograms.

Scotsman's post is an extreme example of starvation, but there was a man named Dennis Galer Goodwin, who went on hunger strike for 385 days to support his innocence when he was imprisoned for rape. 

After a 385-day he was force-fed through a tube.


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Source: Business Insider