Hurricane chasing blog will be covering a current ongoing chase intercept expedition of major Hurricane Dean on the Island of Jamaica. Hurricane Chaser Jim Edds is on location in Kingston, Jamaica for the landfall of this strong category 4 hurricane on Sunday. This site will be updating with pictures and video throughout the event.No area along the southern coast of Peru, which was ravaged by an earthquake that killed at least 510 people, appears to have been harder hit than this port city.
Most of the city’s homes and office buildings were destroyed, leaving survivors wandering the streets and mourning in the open air, surrounded by shards of adobe and cinderblocks.
Rescuers have been forced by the destruction to walk far out of their way as they carried bodies, sometimes in coffins on their shoulders, toward a makeshift morgue at the overwhelmed hospital. Coffins sat in front of many doorways in anticipation of the recovery of loved ones in the rubble.
The world experienced a series of record-breaking weather events in early 2007, from flooding in Asia to heatwaves in Europe and snowfall in South Africa, the United Nations weather agency said on Tuesday.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said global land surface temperatures in January and April were likely the warmest since records began in 1880, at more than 1 degree Celsius higher than average for those months.
There have also been severe monsoon floods across South Asia, abnormally heavy rains in northern Europe, China, Sudan, Mozambique and Uruguay, extreme heatwaves in southeastern Europe and Russia, and unusual snowfall in South Africa and South America this year, the WMO said.
"The start of the year 2007 was a very active period in terms of extreme weather events," Omar Baddour of the agency's World Climate Program told journalists in Geneva.
While most scientists believe extreme weather events will be more frequent as heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions cause global temperatures to rise, Baddour said it was impossible to say with certainty what the second half of 2007 will bring.
"It is very difficult to make projections for the rest of the year," he said.
Two years before a deadly earthquake-triggered tsunami pummeled the Solomon Islands, scientist Fred Taylor's request for U.S. funds to set up a Pacific seismic monitoring network was flatly rejected.
Then there is Phil Cummins of Geoscience Australia, who is still waiting for money from his government to help train South Pacific officials to study corals for clues to the region's tsunami history.
Experts say Taylor's and Cummins' cases underscore a larger problem: a failure by donors, nongovernment and international agencies to finance the science needed to build an accurate record of Asia-Pacific earthquake and tsunami activity.
An earthquake of magnitude 8 struck near the coast of the Solomon Islands, spurring a tsunami warning for Australia and South Pacific island nations.Residents of the coastal settlement of Gizo in the Solomon Islands retreated to high ground as waves damaged buildings, including a local hotel, Robert Iroge, editor of the Solomons Star newspaper said by telephone from the capital, Honiara, today. There are unconfirmed reports that five people are missing, Agence France-Presse reported, citing the Solomon Islands Office of Emergency Management.
Australia's Bureau of Metereology advised people to avoid beaches in the eastern states of Queensland and New South Wales. ``It is quite a dangerous situation,'' spokesman Rob Webb told Sky Television News. ``We are concerned about the entire east coast of Australia for the next two to three hours.''
The quake occurred at 7:39 a.m. Solomon Islands time, 45 kilometers (25 miles) south southeast of Gizo in the New Georgia archipelago and 345 kilometers west northwest of Honiara, at a depth of 10 kilometers, the U.S. Geological Survey said in an e-mailed alert.
"Sea level readings indicate a tsunami was generated,'' the warning center said on its Web site. "It may have been destructive along coasts near the earthquake epicenter and could also be a threat to more distant coasts.''
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AFP - A powerful earthquake with a magnitude of 7.6 struck in the Solomon Islands Monday, prompting the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre to issue a tsunami warning.
