Dr. Jeff Masters' WunderBlog

Quoting washingtonian115:
Good evening.Interesting drive you had :).With these above average temps winter is just about over.Unless of coarse it comes back with a rengence.

Quoting KoritheMan:
They did according to certain simpletons.

Quoting TropicalAnalystwx13:

I know, it's unfortunate really, but as I just said, we cannot have our pie and eat it too.

If I could move everybody out of the plains into bigger, better homes and allow all the tornado outbreaks to occur over the completely abandoned areas, I would. But...that's not plausible.

Quoting AstroHurricane001:
Blog Hype-DEFCON: currently 11.5/10.0



When I first saw this, my immediate thought was: OMG! You have got to be kidding me - that's the exact same day that I'd been predicting a large earthquake!

But then I realized I was using the same "methodology" - that is, counting the number of days from the previous large quake, in this case Chile (2010) --> Japan (2011) --> ??? (2012). The youtube poster in this case has been wrong on earthquakes before, but earthquake prediction is at best an inexact science, and in most cases, not a science at all.

Now, tracing backwards 188-9 days reveals no real results beyond the Chile tremblor, other than a magnitude 6.7 quake in the Ryukyu Islands (17 August 2009) and a magnitude 7.2 in eastern Indonesia (11 February 2009). Both occurred in the Pacific rim, but prior to that, no strong earthquake event occurred in the pattern (unless you consider the mag. 5.5 quake, 29 July 2008 in the Chino Hills area to be a strong quake).

Numerological predictions are probably no more reliable than pure guesswork, unless there is some sort of detectable resonance at work.

Granted, I did actually "predict" the Chile earthquake in February 2010, though was not convinced enough in my "prediction" to explicitly post it (except a few remarks about the Humboldt Current being cut off by a warm ENSO Modoki pool at the location of 1960 Valdivia 9.5). Typically, prior to any major earthquake, there is somebody who predicts it, and the more predictions that are made, the more likely an actual earthquake will be "predicted". I was going to write a blog on the Chile quake and possible links to SSTs and El Nino, but have been neglecting to do so for about the past two years or so as a result of unfair procrastination.

There were also many significant earthquakes I did not predict. This, for example, includes the 7.0 Haiti earthquake, the 9.0 Japan earthquake or the 6.3 New Zealand earthquake. Some failed predictions include a mag. ~7 earthquake in Jamaica, which never occurred, unless a set of magnitude 4.3 quakes is within the margin of error.

There will likely be never (or at most, very few) successful officially-directed evacuations of geologically active areas based on earthquake prediction, although unexpected scientific advances are always possible. Until then, most people in earthquake-prone regions will never receive an accurate warning from a prediction for seismic activity before the earthquake actually strikes in their region. It is much more feasible to predict the weather, and even here there are many people complaining about wrong forecasts that ruined their perfect barbeque.

An interesting fact(oid) is that I read in a book or online resource somewhere apprently linking transits of Venus to tsunamis in the ocean. The transits almost always occur in pairs 8 years apart. For example, there were transits of Venus in 1874 and 1882. There was a magnitude 8.8 earthquake in northern Chile in 1877, and the eruption of Krakatoa, between Java and Sumatra in Indonesia affecting the Indian Ocean, occurred with a catastrophic tsunami in 1883.

It's difficult to tell whether the purported correlation between large tsunamis and Venusian transits has any factual basis; for instance, the 1755 'Lisbon' quake and tsunami occurred six years before the first transit. Even then, we must remember that correlation does not imply causation.

Of course, it is still almost three months prior to this year's transit of Venus, and in the midst of all this quake-rambling, don't forget that a spectacular conjunction of Venus and Jupiter is still visible in the western sky (EDT).

A team of six seismologists is currently on trial in Italy for failing to predict the magnitude-6.3 quake that hit the city of L'Aquila in April 2009. Prosecutors argue that the seismologists gave the public imprecise and incomplete information ahead of the deadly earthquake, which killed 309 residents. Despite an international petition signed by nearly 5,000 scientists in support of the seismologists, if the prosecution wins the case, they will be convicted of manslaughter.

I hope my commentary on geo-tectonics has not been too off-base; some geoscientists suggested decades ago that we would now be in an active geological cycle phase. And now, back to the weather:

A ridge of high pressure and mostly dry weather dominates the central and eastern half of North America this week. Some pop-up thunderstorms are continuing across the Southeastern Continental United States. Look for higher instability and elevated tornado risk next week.

Quoting OracleDeAtlantis:
The "missing" frames are perhaps the most interesting observation. I haven't verified this, however...

Quoting Tropicsweatherpr:
The Pacific has cooled a bit in the past couple of weeks.

March 1rst



March 15th

Quoting OracleDeAtlantis:
The "missing" frames are perhaps the most interesting observation. I haven't verified this, however.

Quoting BobWallace:
Anyone else have their screens freeze up for a while due to the animations sunlinepr posts?

I can't scroll past them until they play through or whatever.