Maleny Weather

A strong 6.3-magnitude earthquake has struck Papua New Guinea with no immediate tsunami warning or reports of damage.
The quake hit around three kilometres off the west coast of the island of New Britain early Monday morning at a depth of 192 kilometres.
PNG sits on the so-called “Pacific Ring of Fire”, a hotspot for seismic activity due to friction between tectonic plates.

At least 127 people were killed and 2,000 are missing after mudslides swept away homes and destroyed roads in northwest China as the nation battled its worst flooding in a decade
The landslides swept mud, houses, cars and other debris into a river running through Gannan prefecture.

An ice island measuring 260 square kilometres broke off from one of Greenland’s two main glaciers, scientists say, the biggest such event in the Arctic in nearly 50 years.

The new ice island, which broke off on Thursday, will enter a remote place called the Nares Strait, about 1,000 kilometres south of the North Pole between Greenland and Canada.

Professor of ocean science and engineering at the University of Delaware, Andreas Muenchow, said he had expected an ice chunk to break off from the Petermann Glacier, one of the two largest remaining ones in Greenland, because it had been growing in size for seven or eight years. But he did not expect it to be so large.

“The freshwater stored in this ice island could keep the Delaware or Hudson Rivers flowing for more than two years,” Professor Muenchow said.

“It could also keep all US public tap water flowing for 120 days.”

He said it was hard to judge whether the event occurred due to global warming because records on the sea water around the glacier have only been kept since 2003.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and its British counterpart, the Met Office have released a report today that confirmed the existence of global warming.
According to the yearly climate change report released by the two institutions we live through the warmest period of the decade – but this decade was also the warmest for the last 50 years. This warming is part of a pattern observed for the last 50 years.
Over 300 scientists from 48 countries have measured the air and sea temperatures, the Arctic sea ice, the snow cover and the humidity in the Northern Hemisphere, using weather satellites, ships, buoys, weather balloons and synoptic land based weather stations. All the evidence collected by these scientists points to just one conclusion; the global warming is here and its presence can be felt by all of us.
Each decade, since the 1980’s, has been warmer than the previous ones – the temperatures have been rising approximately one-fifth degree Fahrenheit every 10 years. The effects are the heat waves, the heavy rainfall and the melting of the glaciers we have seen lately.
The report released by the two institutions does not contain data collected this year, but NOAA’s representative said that this is the hottest year of the decade and the annual average global temperature will most probably be exceeded this year.

Oil seems elusive for skimmers and clean up workers along the Gulf of Mexico. It has been just over 10 days since BP successfully capped the well on July 15th, stopping the flow of oil for the first time in 3 months. It has been just days after a fading Tropical Storm Bonnie passed directly over the site of the oil spill. Instead up churning up more oil and pushing it onshore, it is hard to find.
Before the well was capped, 800 skimmers were collecting an average of 85,000 barrels of oil each day. Since then, the take has been 56 barrels.
The latest information from the US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) indicated only seven sizeable patches of surface oil, all light sheen.
Instead of the worse case scenario, is it possible that nature healed itself faster than we ever expected? Decades after the Exxon Valdez, oil can still be found under rocks on the shore, but this is a different situation. The Gulf of Mexico is semi-tropical. Frequent storms, high sun angle, and warm water temperatures between 85F and 90F all contribute to the natural breakdown of oil.

Residents of Papua New Guinea’s sinking Carteret Islands are known as the world’s first climate change refugees but international attention has not translated into relief from their plight.
A relocation process started several years ago but only a handful of islanders have moved to nearby Bougainville.
They are pleading for help to save their relatives from their sinking island homes.
The isolated islands are slowly disappearing under the Pacific Ocean, with rising water inundating crops and spoiling water supplies.

The season’s first tropical storm, named Agatha, has killed 12 people in Guatemala.

Drenching rain, mudslides and floods also left 11 people missing and forced 3,000 to flee their homes.

The fatalities included four children who were buried alive when a mudslide crushed their home in San Jose Pinula, 17 kilometres east of the capital, the National Disaster Agency said.

Four other people were also killed by a mudslide inside their home on Saturday (local time) as the storm front’s outer fringes lashed western Guatemala with rainfall which the US National Weather Service has estimated could total as much as 50-75 centimetres in some areas.

Agatha is also drenching neighbouring El Salvador, where one death has been reported so far by authorities.

Hundreds of Guatemalans were in shelters on Friday (local time) after a powerful eruption at the southern Pacaya volcano killed two people, left three missing and thousands homeless.

On 5^th September 1883 the people of Hawaii were amazed to see their sun turned green with rings of pink, red, orange-rose and brown. This phenomenon was observed and accurately recorded at the time by Sereno Bishop of Honolulu and is now known as Bishop’s Ring.

Ten days earlier and more than a thousand miles away a small island in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra blew itself apart with the loudest bang on earth. The blast was heard across 4500 kilometres, and even in London instruments registered the concussion and continued to do so up to nine days later, when the echoes of the report were making their seventh circuit of the world!

A sea wave 100 metres high swept aside lighthouses like matchsticks, left a Dutch warship three kilometres up a Sumatran valley and drowning over 36,000 people

This was Krakatau.  The explosion pushed a gigantic column of smoke and dust through the ceiling of the troposphere up to a height of 50 kilometres.

Something that made Krakatoa different from other major events in the 19th century was the introduction of the transoceanic telegraph cables. The news of Lincoln’s assassination less than 20 years earlier had taken nearly two weeks to reach Europe, as it had to be carried by ship. But when Krakatoa erupted, a telegraph station at Batavia (present day Jakarta, Indonesia) was able to send the news to Singapore. Dispatches were relayed quickly and literally within hour’s newspaper readers in London, Paris, Boston, and New York were being informed of the colossal events in the distant Sunda Straits.

Climatologists started to study the effect of volcanic dust in the atmosphere using Krakatoa as the baseline and today we have the International Airways Volcano Watch (IAVW) system for the safety of air transport following volcano eruptions.

Since volcanic ash is composed of very abrasive silica materials, it can damage the airframe and flight surfaces, clog different systems, abrade cockpit windows and flame-out jet engines constituting a serious safety hazard. Volcanic ash can also have a serious effect on aerodromes located downwind of a volcanic ash plume since it contaminates runways, ground equipment and aircraft parked or taxiing around the aerodrome.

The IAVW system is designed to detect and track the movement of volcanic ash in the atmosphere and to warn aircraft in flight about this hazard. There are nine Volcanic Ash Advisory Centres responsible for the provision of information related to areas affected by volcanic ash and its future movement. The centres are located at Anchorage, Buenos Aires, Darwin, London, Montreal, Tokyo, Toulouse, Washington and Wellington.

Deep underground, Vulcan, the blacksmith to the gods, keeps his forge going constantly building up enough heat and pressure in readiness for the time to  ‘blow its top’ and throw debris and dust into the atmosphere

The influence of meteorological and climate conditions in the transmission patterns of influenza and its possible seasonality are as yet not adequately understood and are the subject of ongoing research.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) works on aspects of weather, climate and health with the World Health Organization (WHO). While there are some indications that influenza epidemics may be associated with weather conditions, non-climatic factors, including virus type, existing levels of immunity in the population and human behaviour are generally considered to be more closely related to epidemics.