In early May the Chaitén volcano which had been dormant for more than 9,000 years spewed forth a 40,000 foot tall ash plume .

The eruption lasted a month and unleashed a torrent lightning as ash filled the air. The volcano, situated 700 miles south of Santiago, Chile, forced the evacuation of 8,000 people from the nearby village of Chaitén.

This volcanic eruption is roughly comparable in size to the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption that released hundreds of millions of tons of debris in an explosion 1,000 times as powerful as the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki.

The volcanic lightning results from particles in the ash cloud rubbing together as the plume swirls. Scientists aren’t sure about which types of particles generate the most static electricity, and they don’t know how much energy is produced during the event.

The lack of research in this area is extremely understandable. When scientist see an erupting , lightning spewing volcano, they tend to run in the opposite direction.

You can buy quality car emergency kits just about anywhere even at your local Costco. Always have a blanket, food (e.g., power bars) and water in sealed containers. Keep a Catastrophe mini-Kit for your car(s).

Local phone access is often turned off or destroyed during emergencies. Call friends/family outside your state to leave update info. Important: a battery radio for emergency broadcasts; ideally a CB radio or Nextel-type network phone; your Family List with names, essential medical and contact information, as well as local emergency numbers. You can get cost-effective home emergency kits at Costco. Clean out your bathroom cabinets and make sure to pack first aid remedies like ibuprofen, Tylenol, aspirin, bandages, anti-bacterial ointment, etc.

Some doctors will give you double prescriptions once if you ask. Include another plastic sealed container with all of the basic medicines or vitamins you and your family must have. This is a good concentrated food source. If you eat a protein drink (or power bar) regularly, throw in a big container (or a 12-pack of cans/bars) and enough liquid to mix it up. beef stew, spaghetti) and carbohydrate foods like cereal bars and dried fruit leathers for energy.

Concentrate on meals (e.g. If you smoke, put a carton of cigarettes in to prevent withdrawal sickness. Instant coffee keeps withdrawal headaches away. Dried foods will use precious water to reconstitute.

Canned goods as complete meals are ideal. Make a separate sealed container with food in it. Tents, Tarps, Ponchos, Sleeping bags or Wool blankets (wool will keep you warmer even when wet), cooking gear, Lighters, Utensils, Can-openers and a pan to boil water. Clean out the camping gear you are not using: this is the perfect place for it. You need a complete change of dry clothing that you can be warm enough in to sleep while dressed.

Clean out your closets and put in layered clothing AND tough shoes for each family member. Or use a small plastic/metal garden shed in your yard. It is as easy as getting a plastic 55-gallon trash bin with clips on the lid to hold it shut. Create a Catastrophe Kit on your property outside your house and garage (in a back corner of your yard, for instance). Swap water out every six months - put a reminder in your calendar.

Even if some of it is compromised you will still have other bottles intact. I just bought shrink-wrapped cases of quart-sized plastic water bottles and stacked them under the backyard picnic table. At Home: Put at least enough water in sealed containers so that your family will have one gallon per day for two weeks. Keep a Family Emergency Numbers List inside too. Plus, put in dried fruit, power bars, your daily medications or vitamins and a small first aid kit.

At Work: Keep a backpack at work with as much bottled water as you can carry. Thirst kills you faster than famine. Water is number one, so our first tip is, Without water you lose your ability to make clear decisions within 24 hours. Time is the second most important factor in surviving a catastrophe.

You can use these catastrophe survival tips to buy yourself and your family more time. No one can predict the future, but you can take measures now so you know that you have done what you can to prepare. It can happen anywhere, and it is not if, it is when it will happen. Tragically, even 10 days after post-Katrina rescue efforts began, there were still people starving to death in New Orleans. Please, do not for one moment think that Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is going to be able to get to you in time, unless you have already taken these steps to rescue yourself.

After you survive, rebuilding your life and business quickly becomes critical. Whether it is a natural disaster like hurricane Katrina or an unnatural catastrophe like an upwind industrial chemical explosion, what you do now to protect yourself and your family can make the difference between life and death. Whether it’s a self assembled “do-it-yourself” kit or a purchased one, we all need to fulfill this very important element of our disaster survival plan. A survival kit will allow you to take care of your basic needs until help arrives.

First responders and rescue teams may take awhile to get to everyone. You need to be prepared to take care of yourself and your family if that should occur. It is equally important to consider that the home could be destroyed. Many people have invested the time, effort and money to prepare their homes for a disaster.

Also, most manufacturers will assemble custom survival kits for larger groups of people such as businesses, schools or churches. There’s also plenty of extra storage space, which allows you to customize your kit to accommodate your own individual needs. There are kits that are designed specifically for children that include items to keep them entertained during a disaster. There are individual survival kits, 2 person survival kits, and smaller kits to keep in our vehicles.

Others come conveniently packed into backpacks. Some are packaged in storage buckets. There are a variety of survival kit products available. A survival kit includes many products that most of us would not have considered necessary until the time of need had come to pass. Manufacturers have already done the research, procured the basic items in the recommended quantities, made them lightweight and portable, and offer the entire basic kit at an affordable price.

Instead you should give consideration to purchasing a ready-made survival kit. The physical size of the kit can be an issue as well, and portability can become very difficult. Those who do take the initiative in putting a survival kit together, find that the individual items can be costly. Time is valuable and seems to get exhausted focusing on matters that are currently necessary. However, most of us will never follow through with the task.

You should print out the list, purchase the items, squirrel them away and hope the need never arises. You can find out “what” and “how much” of each item is recommended in order to be able to survive for a minimum of three days. Searching the Internet regarding this topic, you will find several sites that catalog the basic recommended items that your survival kit should contain. It is essential in disaster preparedness to organize a disaster survival kit. We all know we should be prepared for disasters.

The forecast center for your region calculates flash flood guidance for all the bodies of water in the area. Areas with a high risk of flash floods (such as the land surrounding large dams) often have warning systems in place to help alert the population in advance of a flood. Dry riverbeds can channel water long distances and create dangerous flood waves, due to the ground being too dry to quickly absorb the water and the lack of plant life to slow the water’s course. Even deserts are not immune to flash flooding. A similar situation occurred in Rapid City, South Dakota, in 1972 when 237 people were killed.

In mountainous regions the rainfall can run down a steep mountain and pick up so much speed that it becomes a dangerous wave moving too fast for people to escape. The roofs, sidewalks, and roads of a city create dangerous amounts of runoff water during big storms, and this runoff can easily become a flash flood if an adequate storm sewer system is not in place. Urbanization is also an important cause of flash floods. Factors such as rainfall intensity and duration, as well as regional topography, can all contribute to a flash flood situation.

As the mesocyclone nears the ground, a visible funnel appears from the base of the storm clouds. This downdraft accelerates as it approaches the ground, and drags the rotating mesocyclone towards the ground with it. As rainfall in the storm increases, it drags with it an area of quickly descending air known as the rear flank downdraft. The life cycle of a tornado begins when a strong thunderstorm develops a rotating mesocyclone high up in the atmosphere.

Tornadoes have been observed on every continent on earth except Antarctica, the majority the world’s tornadoes occur in the United States and in particular Tornado Alley. Some tornadoes can have winds of more than 280mph, can be more than a mile across, and stay on the ground for tens of miles. Most tornadoes have winds of 100mph or less, are approximately 90 meters wide, and travel a few miles before fizzling out.

Tornadoes typically have a visible funnel, with the narrow end touching the surface of the earth. Tornadoes are defined as an aggressively rotating column of air which is in contact with both a cloud base and the earth.

Moisture then condenses, clouds are formed, and the rains begin. As this warm air rises around the storms center, it cools. Therefore, the perfect conditions for a hurricane to form are basically warm water and humid air. Hurricanes occur over oceans where the water is 27°C (80°F) or above, and the air has to also be extremely humid and thick. Katrina, by the way, sustained winds of up to 140 mph.

In order to reach hurricane status it has to have sustainable winds exceeding 74 miles per hour. But a hurricane is not just any tropical storm. Well, without going into to much meteorological detail, a hurricane is basically a tropical storm so therefore can only be found in the tropics, namely the Southern Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea, Gulf of Mexico, and in the eastern Pacific Ocean. So just what are hurricanes and why do they occur in certain parts of the world and not others? It’s not the purpose of this short piece to look for someone or something to blame, as lessons have probably already been learnt from the powers that be, but I just hope that the United States governments and responsible departments do everything in their power to ensure such a catastrophe, as was caused by Katrina, never happens again.

Hurricanes can be highly destructive to say the least. Depending which part of the world you come, from you may here about natures ravaging winds being called tropical cyclones or typhoons, but where I come from in the USA, we know them as hurricanes.

The radar images on their site are updated every thirty minutes. The National Weather Service has a very comprehensive website that will help you learn more about the NOAA weather radars. Storm-total precipitation is an image that represents how much rainfall or precipitation is determined for a storm. One-hour precipitation reports help establish rainfall amount and assess any flash food warnings. This helps us understand a given storm’s general makeup and its strength.

NOAA weather radars use NEXRAD or Next Generation Radar to gather data that will help us understand current and future weather conditions. There are a series of NOAA weather radars that help them do their job. They track weather and climate trends as well as current conditions. The NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) National Weather Service is responsible for monitoring the weather throughout the country. Following the weather patterns can help enhance the quality of our own lives.

So much of our lives are dependent on the weather. Even if you are not an expert, it is still beneficial to learn how to read the National Weather Service radar imagery. There are plenty of resources both in books and online that can help. Satellite images are available to view online, but you may need some guidance when interpreting them. Such a large occurrence of radars allows for more accurate readings.

Experts whose specialty is to interpret the data monitor the National Weather Service radars. From the radar images, data is interpreted and updated constantly to keep all information current. To do so, there is a large network of National Weather Service radars that help gather this information. The National Weather Service is responsible for keeping track of the weather patterns, trends and current conditions in the United States.

Composite reflectivity is often compared with base reflectivity. From this, you can spot any precipitation, understand and measure a storm’s makeup, establish whether or not a hailstorm is possible and better understand the atmosphere. Base reflectivity measures the strength of the signal that is reflected back to the antennae. These are base reflectivity, composite reflectivity, one-hour precipitation and storm total precipitation. There are four types of images that come about because of this technology.

Some areas have a higher concentration of National Weather Service Radars than others, which probably has to do with the conditions of a given area. There is also one above Puerto Rico and one above Guam. National Weather Service Radars are located in each state except all the New England states that are small and can be serviced by the same handful of radars. All these images make up the full picture of storm and weather predictions.

They are base reflectivity, composite reflectivity, one-hour total rainfall and storm total rainfall. There are generally four types of data and images that are produced from these radars. The National Weather Service radars use NEXROD, or Next Generation Radar technology and Doppler radars. All these avenues serve to help us understand the weather conditions and patterns in our own backyards. They then publish some of their images and findings on their website and in other media, such as radio and television.

The Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to Nov. 30, averages 9.6 named storms, 5.9 hurricanes and 2.3 intense hurricanes per year.

According to top researchers thie 2007 Atlantic hurricane season should be extremely active. We are already at 9 hurricanes, which leaves a very good chance that at least one major hurricane will hit the U.S. coastline. Forcaster William Gray expects seventeen more named storms this year. With 5 of them being major hurricanes.

Major hurricanes have winds of 111 mph or greater.

“The probability of a major hurricane making landfall on the U.S. coast this year is 74 percent, compared with the average of 52 percent over the past century.” says forcaster William Gray.

With hurricane season barreling down us everyone should prepare for the worst and be as self-reliant as possible.. Don’t wait until the last minute to get supplies. The best time to put a survial kit together is when you don’t need it.

One of the most important tools for emergency preparedness is your Disaster Supplies Kit. You’ll need provisions to carry you through a week or more after the storm. Remember, there may be no electricity or clean water for days. Downed trees and other hurricane related debris blocking the roads will keep you from traveling far.

Put a kit together for your home & your car. Keep a cooler in your trunk filled with canned food (vienna sausages, jelly beans, m&m’s - anything that keeps), first aid supplies, water, multi-tool, sterno, matches, cord and a blanket. Keep yourself and your family members safe by thinking ahead.