Tornado Can't Destroy This Home!

Too often we expect Mother Nature to respect the homes that we have built, when in reality we should be respecting Mother Nature and building our homes around her capabilities instead. We can’t force people to stop building homes along beaches where hurricanes or erosion could destroy them, nor can we expect people whose whole livelihoods are in Oklahoma and Kansas to just pack up and leave everything in the chance that a tornado might hit there. So the solution may be to build homes that can evade Mother Nature’s cruelest abilities. One company is doing just that.

Ten Design Company in Hong Kong has created a prototype home modeled off of the survival mentality of a turtle. The home is constructed of  simple hydraulic levers which push the home in and out of the ground, when the home’s outer shell detects high velocity winds associated with thunderstorms and especially tornadoes. For decades people have been building their homes up, either on stilts or columns in the hopes that water and/or air would flow underneath them, not affecting the main structure of the home. The problem with this is that people often forget the flying debris that may be associated with that tornado, or the surge that could be associated with that tropical system. Both of those elements are great examples of how going under ground, could be the best option.

The home is not tornado-proof per-say, but rather tornado-evading, since it is instead dodging the weather rather than trying to go against it. The homes are built with a series of solar cells and layers of Kevlar to be able to allow the home maximum natural light, while also keeping it safe from the day-to-day elements. They are also looking into putting carbon nanotubes on the shell of the home to absorb some pollution turning it directly into fuel for the home to power the hydraulics, but this would be something that would likely not have on the initial homes to keep costs down.

As soon as warning sirerns would go off, the sensors on the home would activate, and entire neighborhoods of these homes can be collapsed in mere seconds. After the home has been lowered into the ground, a water tight seal on the roof is locked, making the structure water and wind proof.

10 is currently developing a prototype with a group of ship builders in the US and Africa. The company’s hope is to get a prototype built in the mid-western U.S. to be able to test it in real-life weather scenarios. They would like to take that prototype house to a state fair somewhere in the mid-west to be able to show what it can do, to the people that would likely fit the company’s intended audience.

 

Source:  10 Design Company

Less Pollution = More Rain?

For most people living in the southeastern section of the U.S., many probably feel like they live in Seattle or the Amazon Rainforest instead thanks to the non-stop rain. Well, they can thank the Clean Air Act for that…..sort of.

Back in 1970 the Clean Air Act was passed. This initiative focused on reducing airborne pollutants that posed a threat to human health. Jeremy Diem, a climatologist at Georgia State University performed research looking at 18 National Weather Service co-op weather stations and noticed that Atlanta’s average annual rainfall increased by 10 percent in the decade following the new Clean Air Act. He studied specifically the summer months during the years of 1948 to 2009.

"It suddenly just changed dramatically in the '70s. It wasn't a gradual change. It was pretty abrupt," explains Jeremy Diem, a climatologist at Georgia State University who performed the research. But not everyone agrees. "Other people said we had a recession and that caused less fuel to be consumed," Diem said, although he does agree that that was also probably a factor.

Diem explains that having a lot of pollution in the air can lead to clouds being “less efficient”. In general, any water molecule can create a cloud, but you need specific types of water molecules to make a cloud drop rain. Standard clouds form from small particles that are almost perfectly uniform in both particle and water vapor size. This is especially the case when a lot of pollution is factored into the clouds. However, in order for the cloud to create falling rain, the particles must be of various sizes.

"You don't want tons of little ones, which is what Atlanta had in the '50s and '60s," Diem said.

How does he know that? Well, the first 5 years after the Clean Air Act was passed, the recorded emissions of particles with diameters of 10 micrometers or less decreased by about 40 percent nationwide, that according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Diem took his research one step further. He used the results he got from looking at the weather stations in rural areas to predict what the rainfall values would be at some of the urban and suburban locations. What the results showed was that rainfall in the urban areas was greatly suppressed before the Clean Air Act. How much so? The urban/suburban areas had rainfall totals of about 1.6 inches less in the 1950 and 60s (when air pollution peaked). In the 1970s those summer rainfall levels went back to the normal 11.8 inches. Starting in the 1980s the numbers started to become more consistent, and remained that way all the way through 2009 (the last year that was studied).

Diem’s research will be published in the August 2013 edition of the Journal of Atmospheric Science, although he says he isn’t finished. He would like to continue the study in other cities such as Minneapolis, Cincinnati, Dallas, Oklahoma City, and a few others.

For more on the EPA’s Clean Air Act click here.

Sources: Live Science, National Geographic, Southern Environmental Law Center, EPA