Tornadoes ???
Walter Dao
How come no tornado/hurricane/tidal wave ever hits the L.A. area ? It is
pretty close to the pacific ocean (and these things happen to hawaii)
Walt
Doug Krause
#
#How come no tornado/hurricane/tidal wave ever hits the L.A. area ? It is
#pretty close to the pacific ocean (and these things happen to hawaii)
We get the occasional tornado. One touched down here in Irvine a couple
of years ago.
Douglas Krause One yuppie can ruin your whole day.
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University of California, Irvine Internet: dkr...@orion.oac.uci.edu
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dho...@hmcvax.claremont.edu
> In article <l9ocp3...@aludra.usc.edu> wd...@aludra.usc.edu (Walter Dao) writes:
> #How come no tornado/hurricane/tidal wave ever hits the L.A. area ? It is
> #pretty close to the pacific ocean (and these things happen to hawaii)
> We get the occasional tornado. One touched down here in Irvine a couple
> of years ago.
Tornados prefer flat terrain so they're understandably rare here.
Hurricanes move northeast. There ain't no ocean to the southwest.
They also like to spawn themselves off of warm water. Our ocean
water flows south so its a bit on the chilly side.
There was a threat of a tidal wave in the late sixties (saw it on
Dragnet). Didn't come to much when it got here. Tsunamis are
generated by undersea earthquakes. We're just lucky about the
placement of the really nasty faults in the Pacific.
-dh
Bill who?
>There was a threat of a tidal wave in the late sixties (saw it on
>Dragnet). Didn't come to much when it got here. Tsunamis are
>generated by undersea earthquakes. We're just lucky about the
>placement of the really nasty faults in the Pacific.
>
>-dh
When the Good Friday (March 27, 1964, 5:36pm Alaska time) earthquake hit Prince
Williams Sound in Alaska (originally an 8.4 on the R scale, upgraded to a 9.2
after analysis of the data, shaking lasted for 4.5 minutes, yes minutes, and
the first shock was a 7-15 foot drop of the entire plate which included the
city of Anchorage!) fear of a possible tsunami along the entire west coast of
the lower 48 was suddenly a reality and there was a minor local panic. The
resulting tidal wave did kill 16 people along the Oregon and Northern
California coast but never made it this far south. I remember I was in grade
school, lived in Reseda and was worried that "the Big Wave" was coming!
In Anchorage, and the Kenai Pennisula which extends south and west from
Anchorage, the normal tidal displacement (difference in low and high tide) is
33 feet. (somewhere in northeast Canada it is in excess of 50 feet!) This may
have helped Anchorage as it was low tide and the Turnagain and Knik Arms
of Cooks Inlet that the city is 2/3 surrounded by were empty and could absorb
a lot of the generated wave.
And the constant shaking of a 9.2 magnitude quake for 4.5 minutes (when it
shakes for more than 15 seconds here in LA you think it is a lifetime!) just
puts out wave after wave which tend to "stack up" as they radiate out from the
epicenter of the earthquake. As such, wave activity close to the quake's center
may not look like much, although the fishing town of Seward on the Kenai
pennisula facing the epicenter was destroyed by the tital wave
with 13 people killed and Kodiak, south and west of the epicenter on Kodiak
Island was also destroyed with 6 fatalities. But if a tsunami can travel for
several hundred miles uninterrupted, like it did to the Oregon/ Northern
California coast, well, they can be very serious, especially to populated
coastal areas, something Alaska still does not have :)
One other point of interest about this quake: there was a noticible abrupt
change in the levels of well water felt as far away as South Africa! This
would indicate that the shock didn't simply pass from plate to plate but
through the earths core. Interesting. Yes, there has been a bigger quake
recorded, in Chili in 1968, 9.5 in a very remote mountain region south
of the 45th parallel. This quake was said to have, according to indiginous
tribes in the area, actually changed the horizon and leveled mountains.
Kind of a bibilical thing. The shock in Argentina, on the other side of
the Patagonias (a large serious granite mountain range) killed several
people in remote locations there!
Not to worry, when the big one hits everything east of the San Andreas
fault will fall into the Atlantic Ocean :)
Bill
Michael Scott Ludwig
=In article <2A9C8F9...@orion.oac.uci.edu>, dkr...@hydra.acs.uci.edu (Doug Krause) writes:
=> In article <l9ocp3...@aludra.usc.edu> wd...@aludra.usc.edu (Walter Dao) writes:
=
=> #How come no tornado/hurricane/tidal wave ever hits the L.A. area ? It is
=> #pretty close to the pacific ocean (and these things happen to hawaii)
=
=> We get the occasional tornado. One touched down here in Irvine a couple
=> of years ago.
Just to add another data point to exceptions that prove the rule, I'll
mention that I've read in a book that a hurricane hit the San Diego area in
1974 (I think that was the year). It caused a good amount of damage (sorry
about the oxymoron).
=Hurricanes move northeast. There ain't no ocean to the southwest.
You must have your directions confused. There's a lot of ocean to the
southwest of the L.A. area.
"Planet Bog - pools of toxic chemicals | Michael Ludwig
bubble under a choking atmosphere |
of poisonous gases. But aside from | mlu...@bonnie.ics.uci.edu
that, it's not much like Earth." |
- Calvin (of Calvin & Hobbes) | UCI and I don't agree on anything.
--
Michael S. Ludwig
Larry Gilmore
>dho...@hmcvax.claremont.edu writes:
>=In article <2A9C8F9...@orion.oac.uci.edu>, dkr...@hydra.acs.uci.edu (Doug Krause) writes:
>=> In article <l9ocp3...@aludra.usc.edu> wd...@aludra.usc.edu (Walter Dao) writes:
>=
>=> #How come no tornado/hurricane/tidal wave ever hits the L.A. area ? It is
>=
>
>You must have your directions confused. There's a lot of ocean to the
>southwest of the L.A. area.
>
>
of Alaska. Hurricanes need warm water to feed on.
--
Larry A. Gilmore Internet: gil...@venice.sedd.trw.com
TRW SEDD, DH1/2849
P.O. Box 6213 Phone: (310)764-3318
Carson, CA 90746 Fax: (310)764-3946
Steve Jenkins
>In article <2A9C8F9...@orion.oac.uci.edu>, dkr...@hydra.acs.uci.edu (Doug Krause) writes:
>> In article <l9ocp3...@aludra.usc.edu> wd...@aludra.usc.edu (Walter Dao) writes:
>
>> #How come no tornado/hurricane/tidal wave ever hits the L.A. area ? It is
>> #pretty close to the pacific ocean (and these things happen to hawaii)
>
>> We get the occasional tornado. One touched down here in Irvine a couple
>> of years ago.
>
>Tornados prefer flat terrain so they're understandably rare here.
Tornadoes typically form at the interface of warm, moist air (such as
low pressure regions creeping northward from the Gulf of Mexico) and
much cooler polar air masses moving rapidly south. That's why the
highest frequency of tornadoes in the US occurs in the deep south and
the southern midwest. The weather in Southern California is too boring
to make tornadoes very often. :-)
>Hurricanes move northeast. There ain't no ocean to the southwest.
>They also like to spawn themselves off of warm water. Our ocean
>water flows south so its a bit on the chilly side.
Gee, according to my map, there's nothing *but* ocean to the
southwest. I presume you've switched east and west. Even so,
hurricanes only tend to the northwest. A hurricane can move
any direction at all, depending on the local conditions (Andrew went
due west across southern Florida and actually moved back east into
Mississippi after landfall in Louisiana.) Most of the difficulty of
hurricane prediction follows from their mercurial insistence on
changing direction.
Hurricanes gain their energy from sunlight and water heat. Don's
right about the ocean temperature, and that's probably the biggest reason
Pacific hurricanes are somewhat rare off North America.
I grew up in Mississippi and have been closer to both hurricanes and
tornadoes than I liked on occasion.
--
Steve Jenkins jen...@devvax.jpl.nasa.gov
Caltech/Jet Propulsion Laboratory (818) 306-6438
Reid Kneeland
>In article <l9ocp3...@aludra.usc.edu> wd...@aludra.usc.edu (Walter Dao) writes:
>#
>#How come no tornado/hurricane/tidal wave ever hits the L.A. area ? It is
>#pretty close to the pacific ocean (and these things happen to hawaii)
>
>We get the occasional tornado. One touched down here in Irvine a couple
>of years ago.
Who needs hurricanes? We get earthquakes, floods, brushfires, landslides,
riots, Satanic serial killers...
=====================================================================
Reid Kneeland
re...@ttidca.tti.com (that's MISTER re...@ttidca.tti.com to you!)
{philabs,psivax,pyramid,quad1,rdlvax,retix,rutgers}!ttidca!reid
Transaction Technology Inc., Santa Monica, CA, USA (310) 450-9111 x2499
The opinions expressed above do not necessarily etc etc...
Never trust a man who can count to 1,023 on his fingers.
dho...@hmcvax.claremont.edu
> dho...@hmcvax.claremont.edu writes:
> You must have your directions confused. There's a lot of ocean to the
> southwest of the L.A. area.
I grew up in Chicago. West is the direction away from the water ;-)
-dh
Mel Roseman
We haven't had any tidal waves within recent memory (our bays
don't "funnel" the waves, I guess, but tornadoes and waterspouts are not
unknown; in fact, the roof was taken off the L.A. Convention Center and
many nearby buildings were severely damaged just a few years ago by a
tornado. As for hurricanes, we're too far north (the water is too cold)
for hurricanes to vent their full fury here,a but in 1939, L.A. was struck
by what remained of a hurricane with lots of wind, rain, and some damage.
Of course other parts of the country don't get our earthquakes, so it may
be a case of "give a little; take a little."
- Mel Roseman
Robert S. Helfman
>In article <2A9DEC6...@ics.uci.edu> mlu...@ics.uci.edu (Michael Scott Ludwig) writes:
>>dho...@hmcvax.claremont.edu writes:
>>=In article <2A9C8F9...@orion.oac.uci.edu>, dkr...@hydra.acs.uci.edu (Doug Krause) writes:
>>=> In article <l9ocp3...@aludra.usc.edu> wd...@aludra.usc.edu (Walter Dao) writes:
>>=
>>=> #How come no tornado/hurricane/tidal wave ever hits the L.A. area ? It is
>>=
>of Alaska. Hurricanes need warm water to feed on.
>
The water is cool because the Coriolis effect causes the southbound current
to move to its right (west) and offshore. The icy water at the sea bottom
upwells at the coastline and that's what we experience. Actually, if you
go offshore a couple of hundred miles, the water isn't any colder than at
this latitude off of Portugal and Spain. It's interesting to note that
if you examine the isotherms of sea temperature on the west coast of North
America, there is an extreme low just south of San Francisco at
San Gregorio. You have to go almost to Juneau, Alaska, to find equally
cold water in summer. The sea-bottom water usually just a degree of above
freezing, so any upwelling has a severe effect.
Robert S. Helfman
>> In article <l9ocp3...@aludra.usc.edu> wd...@aludra.usc.edu (Walter Dao) writes:
>
>> #How come no tornado/hurricane/tidal wave ever hits the L.A. area ? It is
>> #pretty close to the pacific ocean (and these things happen to hawaii)
>
>> We get the occasional tornado. One touched down here in Irvine a couple
>> of years ago.
>
>Tornados prefer flat terrain so they're understandably rare here.
>
We don't get the radical temperature drop-vs-altitude rates that they
get in the midwest, particularly when a cold front overrides a warm front,
resulting in very moist warm air at the surface with cold dry air above that.
That produces extremely strong vertical motion, and that, coupled with
the strong wind shear associated with the frontal boundary produces
tornadoes.
>Hurricanes move northeast. There ain't no ocean to the southwest.
>They also like to spawn themselves off of warm water. Our ocean
>water flows south so its a bit on the chilly side.
Huh? If that isn't an ocean to the southwest of us, just what is it?
Hurricanes in the Atlantic generally move from the tropics northWEST into
the Florida or Gulf Coast area, sometimes up the Eastern seaboard.
We get the remnants of hurricanes from the west coast of Mexico. In fact,
the very humid weather we had a week or so back was from a series of
Baja hurricanes which started on Mexico's west coast and moved northwest
toward Hawaii. We got the moisture off their northeast edges. Just look at
the satellite maps in the L.A. Times Metro section. For a couple of weeks,
there was almost always a hurricane visible. There have been so many
this season that they're past the letter J (Javier), whereas the east coast
season has just begun (Andrew). You are right about the offshore
water here being quite cold for this latitude. That's why the smaller
hurricanes poop out before they get to L.A. and generally just produce
muggy weather and some thunderstorms. If a storm gets large while still
in tropical waters, it will have enough 'umphh' to be serious even after
it winds down in our colder water. We have had some incredible bouts of
hurricane weather in the past - in the summer of 1983 we had weeks of
muggy weather, endless rain, and squirrely winds. A whole series of Baja
hurricanes made their appearance that year.
(R.S. Helfman - no expert, but a B.A. in Meteorology from UCLA, '62)