No, this is not about the effects of some kind of smelly cheese. The weather has yet again taken a turn for the worse in Europe and apparently produced winds strong enough to kill almost fifty people (reported so far), most of whom are said to have been motorists. What percentage of the population would not be considered a motorist these days?
The hurricane-like storms also shutdown oil pipelines and public transportation and even led to a computer virus warning.
Most news reports said something to the effect of the “worst storm in years”, perhaps due to the fact that the storms in 1999 and 2000 were called the “worst storms in living memory”. Scientists quoted in the news all seem to point to a predicted increase in severe weather related to a steady rise measured in sea temperatures. The consequences of this were also described in the movie “An Inconvenient Truth”.
This reminded me of an incident several years ago when a Monterey Bay research buoy was launched to study extreme weather conditions.
The new MBARI mooring deployed earlier this month broke free from its anchor during the heavy storm Saturday, December 14. The oceanic buoy was anchored 52 kilometers from shore in Monterey Bay. It successfully sent data back to shore even through the storm. The mooring is an engineering prototype for the MBARI ocean observing system (MOOS) project. The mooring was intentionally deployed during the winter to monitor how the buoy and cable respond to environmental stresses when wind and waves reach their maximum strengths.
I guess this might have been called a beta test, but I wonder how much more it would have cost to make the buoy less susceptible to being broken in its first month. Or perhaps the data that was used during the buoy design phase to estimate future storm strength was incomplete or optimistically inaccurate?
