Norfolk: Some coastal thoughts to consider…..

MoonHowler

norfolk

Washingtonpost.com:

Norfolk exists because of the sea. Ships have been built in its harbors since the Revolutionary War. It is home to the largest naval base on the globe. Bounded by the Chesapeake Bay and two rivers, sliced by coastal creeks, Norfolk has always been vulnerable to flooding. But over the past decade, people began noticing alarming trends.

Hurricanes and nor’easters became more frequent and more damaging. Even ordinary rainstorms swamped intersections, washed away parked cars and marooned the region’s major medical center. Before 1980, the inlet near the Chrysler Museum, known as the Hague, had never flooded for more than 100 hours in a year. By 2009, it was routinely flooded for 200 and even 300 hours a year.

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Mudslide victim wanted to live anywhere he wanted

MoonHowler

Thom  Satterlee, a local community activist, attempted to lead an effort to secede from Snohomish County.  He didn’t like the land use restrictions and many other things dished out by local government.  One has to wonder how that worked out for him in the past couple of days.  Thom and his wife are among the missing in the giant landslide in Washington State.

NBCnews.com:

Among those missing in the landslide that devastated a small Washington community is the leader of a group that sought to secede from Snohomish County over land-rights issues, including whether government could restrict property owners from building in risky or environmentally sensitive areas like the one buried by the slide.

Thom Satterlee, 65, and his wife, Marlese, 61, both are missing from their home in the community of Oso in the wake of Saturday’s landslide, which spewed tons of mud and debris over homes scattered along the Stillaquamish River. A daughter, Andrea Hulme, did not respond to an interview request from NBC News, but a message on her answering machine said, “My parents are missing in the mudslide.”

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South Parked

MoonHowler

 

I lived in Atlanta when I was a kid, for 3 years.  Most of the time it was Hotlanta and that was before the days where AC was standard in most houses.  We had a dishwasher and I thought we were royalty.

There were a couple of snow storms while I was there.  My brother and I had sleds.  We had just moved from New Jersey.  All the other kids liked us because of those sleds and begged for a turn.   I can’t remember huge amounts of snow but it got pretty slick and I think we even got snow days.  We lived on a slight hill.  We could drag up to the top of the hill and go pretty much to the bottom for a couple of hours.

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More deadly storms

MoonHowler

Chicagotribune.com:

 

The scale of Sunday’s deadly storms became clearer this morning: Six people dead in Illinois, hundreds of homes flattened and splintered, 81 tornadoes sighted through the Midwest, 358 reports of damaging winds, 40 reports of large hail.

Since 1986, there have been 194 tornado warnings issued in the month of November in Illinois: More than half of them, 101, were issued Sunday, according to the Chicago Weather Center.

As crews fanned out from the National Weather Service to assess the storm’s impact, WGN-TV meteorologist Tom Skilling said it may go down as one of the most powerful to hit the region in decades.

“It appears the storm may have produced the most powerful Illinois November tornado on record outside of St. Louis (and possibly elsewhere) and may be one of the four most intense Great Lakes storms of the past five decades,” he said.

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Moon mission to launch from Wallop’s Island

MoonHowler

wallops island

Washingtonpost.com:

For the first time, a spacecraft is to be launched from Virginia to the moon.

The launch is scheduled for Sept. 6 from NASA’s facility at Wallops Island on Virginia’s Atlantic coast.
If all follows the plan, and the clouds cooperate, the 11:27 p.m. launch should be visible in Washington and in much of the Northeast.

The mission will not land on the moon, but it is intended to go into orbit around it.

The robotic mission is to collect detailed information about the moon’s thin atmosphere. Sometimes thought to be nonexistent, the lunar atmosphere has been described as extremely tenuous and fragile, but present.

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Roswell: Happy 66th Anniversary

MoonHowler

-RoswellDailyRecordJuly8,1947

Tired of hearing and reading about Egypt and Korean airline crashes?  I have just the thing for you.  Its loaded with consipiracy theory even if  we want to bring a little tin foil to the table.

Roswell, New Mexico–July 8, 1947.  It was right after WWII and people were settling down to normal…or perhaps I should say the new normal.   Then came the crash.

Movies and TV shows have been made about Roswell.   Much of the Xfiles was rooted in Roswell.  Roswell today is synonymous for alien.

wikipedia:

The Roswell UFO incident took place in the U.S. in 1947, when an airborne object crashed on a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico, on July 7, 1947. Explanations of what actually took place are based on both official and unofficial communications. Although the crash is attributed to a U.S. military surveillance balloon by the U.S. government, the most famous explanation of what occurred is that the object was a spacecraft containing extraterrestrial life. Since the late 1970s, the Roswell incident has been the subject of much controversy, and conspiracy theories have arisen about the event.

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The summer solstice June 21, 2013

MoonHowler

 

solstice_map_june2013_600

earthsky.org:

Why celebrate the solstice?  Cultures universally have had markers, holidays, and alignments – all related to the solstice.

It has been universal among humans to treasure this time of warmth and light.

For us in the modern world, the solstice is a time to recall the reverence and understanding that early people had for the sky.  Some 5,000 years ago, people placed huge stones in a circle on a broad plain in what’s now England and aligned them with the June solstice sunrise.

We may never comprehend the full significance of Stonehenge.  But we do know that knowledge of this sort wasn’t isolated to just one part of the world.  Around the same time Stonehenge was being constructed in England, two great pyramids and then the Sphinx were built on Egyptian sands.  If you stood at the Sphinx on the summer solstice and gazed toward the two pyramids, you’d see the sun set exactly between them.

Did you do anything special?  Did today seem longer than any other day?  Mine started off way too early.  I am fortunate I can make up for lost  sleep.

Time to get ready for the super moon this weekend.

Most “super” supermoon of 2013 on June 22-23

MoonHowler

Is everyone ready for the superest super moon this weekend?  Why is this the supermoon weekend?  The full moon is the nearest it gets to the earth in a year.

super moon 1

From earthsky.org:

…[A]stronomers call this sort of close full moon a perigee full moon.  The word perigee describes the moon’s closest point to Earth for a given month.  Two years ago, when the closest and largest full moon fell on March 19, 2011, many used the term supermoon, which we’d never heard before.  Last year, we heard this term again to describe the year’s closest full moon on May 6, 2012.  Now the term supermoon is being used a lot.  Last month’s full moon – May 24-25, 2013 – was also a supermoon.  But the June full moon is even more super!  In other words, the time of full moon falls even closer to the time of perigee, the moon’s closest point to Earth.  The crest of the moon’s full phase in June 2013, and perigee, fall within an hour of each other

Coming to a sky near you this weekend.  Hopefully skies will be clear..

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National Weather Service Director attributes some extreme weather to climate change

MoonHowler

extreme weather

USAToday.com:

Wild weather in recent years — from Hurricane Sandy and deadly tornado outbreaks to extremes of drought and floods — likely can be traced, in part, to climate change, the National Weather Service director says.

The  onslaught of wild weather that has battered the USA in recent years — from Hurricane Sandy and deadly tornado outbreaks to  extremes of drought and floods — looks to be part of a “new normal” for weather patterns in the U.S.,  new National Weather Service Director Louis Uccellini said Wednesday.

In comments to  the USA TODAY Editorial Board,  Uccellini also cited the “likely” contribution of global warming to the extreme weather.

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Cuccinelli called out over climate change on the US Senate floor

MoonHowler
Senator Sheldon whitehouse
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse

Washingtonpost.com:

RICHMOND — U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse frequently takes to the  Senate floor to warn against climate change, having done so, by his count, at least two dozen times in the past year. So perhaps it was only a matter of time before the Rhode Island Democrat got around to calling out Virginia’s most prominent global-warming skeptic by name.

Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II, the presumptive Republican nominee for governor, got a backhanded shout-out in a Whitehouse floor speech last week for his unsuccessful legal battle against a University of Virginia climate scientist.

The battle went something like this:

“In 2010, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli used his powers of office to harass former University of Virginia climatologist Michael Mann and 39 other climate scientists and staff,” Whitehouse said in a speech Thursday, which was posted on YouTube. “As a U-Va. grad, I am proud that the university fought back against this political attack on science and on academic freedom.”

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Treasures from the Sky

MoonHowler

A small town in Siberia collects the many small rocks that fell from the sky after the meteor explosion in Siberia last week. Scientists worry that the collectors are damaging scientific evidence. The towns people are just glad to have something to help out. It looks like hard times are not a stranger to this area of the world.

The children are just like children everywhere. The cold doesn’t seem to bother them but I am still cold after watching the video.

Gov. Christie gets a little relief–darn little!

MoonHowler

sandy relief

Washingtonpost.com:

Congress has approved $9.7 billion in new aid for victims of Hurricane Sandy, with a face-
saving quick move by the House taken three days after Speaker John A. Boehner earned scathing criticism from New York and New Jersey Republicans for canceling a late-night vote on the funds.

The bill, which will allow the Federal Emergency Management Agency to pay out claims to those who held federal flood insurance, was approved in the House on a 354 to 67 vote. After the House action, the Senate also adopted the bill in a quick unanimous voice vote, sending it to President Obama.

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Gov. Chris Christie unleashes fury at Boehner, calls house “toxic”

MoonHowler

Washingtonpost.com:

 

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) condemned House Republicans Wednesday afternoon for failing to pass a $60 billion package of funding for Hurricane Sandy relief. In the strongest terms, he accused House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) of letting “toxic internal politics” impede necessary storm relief.

“There’s only one group to blame for the continued suffering of these victims: the House majority and their speaker,” Christie said. “It was disappointing and disgusting to watch.”

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Winter Solstice 12-21-12

MoonHowler

winter-solstice 2

Winter Solstice happens on a busy day.  As if  being the Mayan Doomsday isn’t enough, today is the shortest day of the year, which is what the Winter Solstice is.

Astronomically,  Winter Solstice represents the shortest day and the longest night, when the sun is lowest on the horizon in the northern hemisphere.  After 12-21-12, the days will get longer.  12-21-12 marks the first day of winter–known to the ancients as the starving time or the dark time.  Daylight on Friday, December 21, 2012 will officially be 9 hours, 26 minutes long.    Winter begins at 11:09 a.m.  (The Washington Post says 6:12 a.m. but who’s counting?)

The Capital Weather Gang reports some interesting facts HERE.

Winter was a very terrifying time for ancient people.  Darkness consumed much of their day.  Freezing temperatures, snow, ice and freezing rain made life difficult and dangerous.  Survival was never a sure thing.   Too much snow could trap the ancients inside their shelters which were usually caves.  Those who couldn’t get out often died of thirst and hunger.  Its no wonder that rituals began and the night before winter began was one of merriment–a little cheer to tide the folks over until spring.

winter hag

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