Vol. 5
No.1
January 2011
The IUP Journal of
EARTH SCIENCES
www.iupindia.in
The IUP Journal of
1111'
EARTH SCIENCES
Vol. 5 No. 1
January 2011
C 0 n tent S
With best compliments Managing Editor IUP Publications
Focus
5
Influence of the Sun in the Genesis of Tornadoes
7
Saumitra Mukherjee and Milan Radovanovic
Groundwater Investigation Using ERT at Al-Ain, UAE: A Case Study
22
AmirGabr
Quality Assessment and Geochemical Processes of Groundwater in Singipuram River Basin of Salem District, Tamil Nadu , India
37
A Solai, V Ram Mohan and M Suresh Gandhi
Land Use and Land Cover Assessment Along Tiruchirappalli City Using Remote Sensing
60
C Parthasarathy, Karthik Kumaresan, Chitralekha Sumbrui, Sathees Kumar, Nisha Radhakrishnan and Samson Mathew
New Results on the Behavior of a Magnetic Dipole Freely Floating on Water Surface A M Aslanyan, Kh H Manaselyan and MA Zohrabyan
69
Influence of the Sun in the Genesis of Tornadoes Saumitra Mukherjee* and Milan Radovanovic**
Tornadoes represent one of the extremely strong and destructive disasters which, besides considerable losses, take away many casualties. In Ireland, they occur averagely less than five times throughout January. The quantitative parameters, by which the detailed development of the synoptic situations would be presented, have often been without relevant indices. The reason lies in the fact that in winter, the trajectories of tornadoes spread over relatively small areas that are usually far away from the meteorological stations. In the last few years, there were many papers, on the basis of which certain link between the solar activity and cyclogenesis could be seen. The research of the statistical correlation was done on the basis of daily values for the period from 2004 to 2007, in order Lo establish which of the indices of the solar activity pointed to the eventual connection on the global level. By additional check, i.e., the use of Wilcoxon test, it turned out on the statistically significant level that the inflow of protons had preceded the cyclonic movements of air masses two days before they appeared anywhere on the Earth. In the concrete case of tornado in Ireland on January 12, 2004, the indicators that could represent the potential explanation of the Sun-tornado link were analyzed. The aim of the paper is to point out the astrophysical parameters that should be taken into consideration while developing the prognostic models. Keywords: Tornado, Solar activity, Ireland
Introduction The origin and development of tornadoes in any part of Europe, i.e., northern hemisphere and in winter period, represents an unusual and rare phenomenon. The tornado which appeared in Ireland around 02:00 UTC on January 12, 2004 lasted about 20 min. The trajectory of tornado was about 4 km long. Its track took it through the Custom Military Barracks in the center of the Althone town. In most of such cases, there was a lack of detailed numerical values. "As tornadoes only affect a small area, the probability of their being observed at a meteorological station was very small" (Leitao, 2003). However, their sudden appearing, which is impossible to predict for now, represents a special problem, particularly for mean and long-term weather forecasts (Toth and Kalnay, 1993). * Professor (Geology & Remote Sensing), School of Environmental Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi 1100676, India. E-mail:
[email protected] **Professor (Geography), Geographical Instilllte Jovan Cvijic, Serbian Academy of Science and Arts, Belgrade, 9 Djura Jaksic Street, l LOOO Belgrade, Serbia. E-mail:
[email protected] © 2011 TUP. AJJ Rights Reserved.
It is essential to establish the polential causative-effective link between the processes on the Sun and the phenomenon of the cyclonic movements of air masses (Tyrrell, 2007). In that sense, certain statistical procedures were used (Mann-Whitney U-test, Wilcoxon test). Besides that, the chronology of the events was analyzed between the processes that were occurring on the Sun and disturbances in the atmosphere for which it was supposed that they were connected with the phenomenon of tornado in Ireland. The justifiability of this kind of approach lies in the fact that many contemporary studies have pointed to the unclearness, i.e., limited knowledge about the genesis of tornadoes and the influence of the solar activity on the motion of air masses. There are a number of aspects of supercell thunderstorms and tornado genesis that remain poorly understood (Markowski and Richardson, 2009).
Theoretical Background Tornadoes are very rare phenomena in the area of Europe throughout the winter months. Attempting to understand this phenomenon, scientists have been searching for the causes of their origin for a long time, as well as for the possible explanation of the mechanism on the basis of which they are functioning. Not getting into the discussion whether and how the anthropogenic activity can eventually cause the disturbances or making of cyclones, Vermette (2007) stated: "While the number and timing of storms of tropical origin is likely to increase, this increase appears to be attributed to a multidecadal cycle, as opposed to a trend in global warming". Love (2006) concluded among others that "the modest available evidence points to an expectation oflittle or no change in global frequency. Regional and local frequencies could change substantially in either direction, because of the dependence of cyclone genesis and track on other phenomena (e.g., ENSO) that are not yet predictable". Moreover, it is further claimed that because of the tropical cyclone databases utilized for studies on trends in these extreme events, there is an immediate need to conduct an in-depth storm-by-storm reanalysis of tropical cyclones in all basins. Currently, a reanalysis is underway only for the Atlantic basin. There were many papers, earlier, in which the connection between the processes on the Sun and some climate elements was examined. Studying storms in Britain, Wheeler (2001) had relied on the general aspects of the procedure used by Corbyn (2004). Those aspects were based on variations in the Sun's behavior, its magnetic field, coronal eruptions and fluctuating character of Solar Wind (SW). Therefore, it was about methodology that does not have anything in common with the majority of contemporary forecast models in use. The result was that 4 out of 5 strong storms had been correctly predicted during the period October 1995-September 1997. The prediction of the fifth strong storm had the mistake of 48 h, which can be considered as marginal (viewed from the aspect of developing methods), simply because the forecast had been done months earlier. As far as we know, the above-mentioned Corbyn (2004) had not published his methods, because they were used for commercial purposes. The opinion ofCorbyn (2004) was very interesting on that issue: "traditional forecasts can only go up ten days ahead for any meaningful forecast, whereas the Solar Weather Technique can give detailed forecasts of extreme weather many months 8
The IUP Journal of Eanh Sciences, Vol. 5, No. 1, 201 l
ahead. It is proven to be especially accurate for cold snaps and storms. "fradi ti on al forecaste1 believe that the Earth's weather is primarily controlled by weather in the past, which is not true; there are external influences that come from the Sun, and are predictable". Landscheidt (2003) gives a detailed list of papers where the link Sun-atmospheric processes is being proved: "The empirical relationship, presented here, would have a practical value even if there were no Uieoretical background. Many practices in meteorology are on this heuristic level. Yet there are hundreds of observations which show that within a few days after energetic solar eruptions (flares, coronal mass ejections, and eruptive prominences) there are diverse meteorological responses of considerable strength (Scherhag, 1952; Bossolasco et al., 1973; Herman and Goldberg, 1978; Schuurmans, 1979; Markson and Muir, 1980; Bucha, 1983; Neubauer, 1983; Prohaska and Willett, 1983; Reiter, 1983; Landscheidt, 1983-2003; Haigh, 1996; Cliver et al., 1998; Balachandran et al., 1999; Lockwood et al., 1999; Shindell et al., 1999; Egorova et al., 2000; Palle, Bago and Butler, 2000; Sykora et al., 2000; and Yu, 2002)." Giorgieva et al. (2007) concluded that the long-term correlation between solar activity and atmospheric circulation changes in consecutive secular solar cycles and depends on the north-south asymmetry of solar activity: when the northern solar hemisphere is more active, increasing solar activity in the secular (Gleissberg) cycle leads to decreasing prevalence of zonal forms of circulation, while increasing solar activity in secular solar cycles when more active in the southern solar hemisphere leads to increasing zonality of atmospheric circulation. The causative-effective connections between the solar electromagnetic radiation, solar corpuscular radiation, solar flares, solar coronal mass ejections, magnetic clouds, high speed of the SW on one side and the types of the general circulation of the atmosphere on the other side are also examined in the paper. Analyzing the assumptions presented by Radovanovic et al. (2003), Gomes and Radovanovic (2008), as far as it is known, explained for the first time in science, the hypothetic possibility of the formation of hurricanes in the tropical areas under the influence of the kinetic energy of the SW. Hocke (2009) emphasized that the SW Quasi-Biennial Oscillation (QBO) may influence the stratospheric QBO, the global electric circuit and cloud cover by modulation of ionospheric electric fields, cosmic ray flux and particle precipitation. Barrett and Leslie (2009) observed similar results and concluded among others that upper-tropospheric divergence was proposed as the physical link between TC activity and the MJO. The eastward-propagating Kelvin wave sequentially modulates large-scale upper-tropospheric conditions, which impact TC genesis and intensification. Taking these ideas into consideration, the existence of the possible signal which would point to the connection between the processes on the Sun and cyclonic activity in the atmosphere is decided to be established on the basis of the statistical analysis.
Statistical Data Analysis and Results Based on the available data on the annual and moving decadal level, Milovanovic and Radovanovic (2009) tested the relation between the solar activity and atmospheric circulation Influence of the Sun in the Genesis of lbrnadoes
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