User:Weatherlawyer/sandbox

Earthquakes as precursors

This is an idea to relate to the main Wikipedia article Earthquakes.

Concepts:

1. The holy grail of earthquake research is to be able to forecast earthquakes. The fact that there has been little progress in the concept may relate to a teaching that such a thing can not be done. Once you have succeed in closing the minds of your students you have captured them. Until they learn they can break out of your ideas they will not think of trying to.

2. All earth science is Subjective by nature. Until we can find a way to experiment with theories that are as consuming as the Theory of Evolution for example, we are never going to do scientific research. Consider how long a researcher would have to live just to monitor a control protocol.

3. Since the proof of any pudding is in the eating, we don't need to practice planetary research that will use whole solar systems as marbles in a laboratory. All we need to do is come up with all the alternatives that can be imagined for the outcome of a planet wide event such as an earthquake.

4. Once we find ideas that can be used to fit data, we can model further ideas on that data to formulate yet more ideas. But it will all be dependent on empirical outcomes.

Oddities:

1. Earth sciences are littered with oddities. Meteorology has whole sections for them. Consider the term Singularity. Every so often a period occurs where the weather seems to be stuck. Blocking Highs are a particularly well known phenomenon. See also Anomalies.

2. Such oddities also occur in seismology. Swarms for instance and the relationship of large quakes to tidal waves.

Puritanism:

1. If you close your mind to ideas you tend to end up squabbling about taxonomy and semantics. I prefer the term tidal wave to Tsunami. Today they mean exactly the same thing but some people may be upset by the use of such a term. Get a life. There is no point in arguing over silly things.

2. There is too much to be done to waste time categorising things. If you pigeon-hole a thought you may trap it in a category. Time and again there is evidence that one geo-phenomenon is closely related to an ostensibly completely different geo-phenomenon.

3. Do not exclude any possibilities; they may be completely wrong but if all you have to go on is what you have been told by others, they may also be wrong and you could waste time not looking deeper.

4. On the other hand if you hang on to a new idea too long or for all the worng reasons, you may be missing a step or two along the way.

5. Steps along the way. It would seem that the cause of all geo-phenomena is the effects that are produced on the planet by the rest of the solar system. But there must be several steps between the celestial mechanisms and what we see as the effects on earth. If that were not so then simple astronomy and astrology would have united by now to explain the processes.

Beginning at the beginning:

1. All geo-physicists are going to have to come to terms with Newton's works. A lot of it is esoteric and a great deal has been overlooked by lesser men in the last few centuries. The basic problem is the individual's concept of gravity. Most people seem to think that the moon for example can have an effect on individual particles on the surface of the earth and yet regard the effects of the planets on the earth as preposterous due to distance.

2. All effects of planets and moons on individual particles not in free fall in their vicinity are too minute to merit consideration. The tidal effect of the moon on earth, for example, is completely subsumed by the three body problem. All the weight of the moon is taken up with that and there is nothing left over for raising tides.

3. There is an explanation of the moon as a compensator for the effects of the planets in something called the Milankovitch Cycle on You Tube. I can't understand the processes involved in making things change in those cycles, more compelling is the idea of plate tectonics but there again it lacks a mechanism. I have no difficulty rejecting both concepts but I would be foolish to insist anyone follows my example of looking for alternatives.

4. Whilst it is always good to be open to basic ideas and concepts, it is better to follow Newton in not making hypotheses. One tends to get trapped inside them. If you are forced by finances or scale to stick to empirical processes of examination it is essential to remain acutely aware of working only within the facts.

5. You may force the pieces to fit but inevitably, when you drop on the correct solution to what is happening, you will find all the other bits of the puzzle fall into place and become self-explanatory. Years later a new generation, remarkably assisted by hindsight, will wonder why it took you so long to make the obvious connection. Usually, as with all invention, it is because you never thought of it any sooner.

Earthquakes as precursors to tropical storms:

Data Sources.

1. Earthquake lists are available online. The NEIC maintains a database of them that can find even relatively small ones earth-wide that are stored from data going back several decades. The USA seems to following a policy of using closed source to house its data these days. I am using the SED pages at the moment mainly because I can't get on with the format used by the NEIC.

2. The NEIC do allow you to download huge amounts of data en mass. This facility is priceless. SED houses some 4 years of data presented on pages of 300 quakes at a time. This means trawling for past data is time consuming.

3. Websites such as Unisys house data on tropical storms. The data is priceless too but matching one set form one website with another from a different website is complicated. Setting the data out on a spread sheet is time consuming and more often than not a new idea renders all your earlier work obsolete.

4. Coming up with new ideas is a lot easier but getting anyone to take you seriously is impossible without reams of boring cross refenced work for them to wade through.

5. Be prepared to deal with people stuck in a fixed mindset. Inevitably you will be ridiculed and rejections can hurt. Bear in mind they are lost sheep who can make willing converts if you prove to be a peaceable and approachable teacher. A mild answer turns away rage. But you will always have critics that know no better and prefer things that way. If you can't deal with that find other work.

Keeping up to date.

1. Check out the earth-science forecasts that work. Usually there are only one sort of forecast the weather forecast. Find the ones that please you and make an habit of collecting at least on run per day from them. They will quickly build up to a reference work.

2. Weather can only do one of a small list of alternatives. It will either be windy or calm (with a very narrow list of degrees called the Beaufort Scale). It will either be sunny or cloudy (again with a short list of degrees of how cloudy.) It will either be wet or dry. And that is about it. How long before you get some idea what the forecasts are telling you? You can soon apply the concepts better than the weatherman for weather local to you.

3. Look out for butterflies. They will tell you much more about the planet than that the weather is about to change. Especially watch out for anomalies such as severe weather. The degree of certainty your weatherman provides is a major signal to look out for butterflies.

Crossing Over

1. When the weather changes, look out for increased or decreased activity in other branches of earth science. Don't be afraid to wonder if they are connected. As with all your beliefs, the uncertainty principle grows with lack of use or with misuse. The one is the same as the other.

2. Don't expect anyone better than you to put the pieces together. A clever man will have better things to do and a wiser man will realise the difficulties involved. Quite often a shallow stupid man with put more effort into the problem and master the situation when others have been to clever to try.

3. Don't get above yourself. God made the world in 7 days and he made it nearly perfect. Look at what we did to is since then. Who is the One who gets the blame?

4. Bifurcation or Compression? Large harmonics and earthquakes or volcanoes.

Taking to heart the things that work.

1. When the cold wind doth blow we shall have snow and pretty soon, if the situation is harsh or unusual enough, we will have a volcanic eruption that registers on the VEI scale.

2. When there is a lull in the list of earthquakes, the next medium quake to occur will indicate what ocean the next tropical storm will be in. Low magnitude seismic activity is everything up to 5.5M. Medium sized activity is everything from 5.5 to 7M. (Although that upper limit has yet to be confirmed.)

3. When the lull extends beyond about a day and an half, the phenomenon engendered tends to be volcanic instead of meteorological.

4. Tropical storms tend to produce harmonics in the North Atlantic and the North Pacific. For depressions that become Category one tropical storms a large gyre of low pressure too big to be considered a cyclone appears. When the tropical storm is going to be massive, anomalous anticyclones called Blocking Highs appear in the forecasts.

5. The same harmonic appears for volcanic activity. In such cases the centres of the cyclones break up into smaller centres called Complex Systems. When there is going to be a powerful eruption the signal tends to show these centres revolving about one another, usually in an anticlockwise motion.

6. Super-cyclones always have a Blocking High. In fact they are maintained by anticyclonic activity in the near-by upper atmosphere. But it is in the North Atlantic and Pacific Oceans that these blocks become noticeable at sea level.

7. Super-quakes never occur with tropical storms.

8. Just surfing the net when I came across some notes about radar imagery in Arizona from 20 February 2013. On looking up what phenomena were going on at the time I came across an article on solar activity as well as one on volcanic activity which seem to fit. There is always something overlooked.

Interesting directions:

1.Sonoluminescence. The temperatures in a bubble held in a standing wave may reach unimaginably high temperatures. It should help explain why cavitation causes so much damage to ship propellers. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Weatherlawyer/sandbox&action=edit

2. The Slinky spring. The imbalance on the adiabatic transfer of kinetic energy at the last moment of activity explains a storm's forward motion and its asymmetric cross section. http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~hemh/TV/On_Slinky_the_dynamics_of_a_loose_heavy_spring.pdf

3. Rayleigh waves. These are the same thing as surface waves. They move at different speeds per frequency. The deeper the sound the deeper the wave. Surface versions go backwards, deeps sea versions go forwards. These things are the most likely to explain tides aswell as the behaviour of weather etcetera at boundary layers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_wave

4. Maps. The section on earthquake talk has a number of followers willing to work on maps. Can I find any willing and capable of going in my directions

5. Aphasia and accidents, Mainly with mines and traffic (especially ships and aircraft.) Anything where human reflexes and concentration lapses are crucial. Also related are complaints such as arthritis and related illnesses.

Weatherlawyer (talk) 10:40, 26 January 2015 (UTC)