Fresh Loaf

Vine City's JFK Park after last year's tornado

One year after a tornado tore through Atlanta, researchers at the University of Georgia and Purdue University say the city’s asphalt splendor may have helped create the destructive storm:

Cities like Atlanta are full of concrete asphalt and other man-made materials which make the cities hotter than surrounding areas – the so-called urban heat island effect. That urban environment probably intensified the storm into a damaging tornado, the researchers believe.

The jagged contours of the urban landscape as well as the heat pouring off the city helped intensify the pattern of rising, converging air currents that culminated in the violent tornado, Shepherd said.

“The storm system acted like a hammer, and the urban area like a chisel,” Niyogi said.

(Vine City photo by Thomas Wheatley, homepage photo of tornado damage from Andisheh Nouraee’s Flickr)

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A group of scientists at Purdue University have finally made visuals from the numbers, depicting in real-time what the United States’ carbon dioxide emissions from the utility, transportation and industry sectors actually look like. What you will watch below is literally the heartbeat of America.

The video vividly illustrates the concentration of power plants and the massive CO2 output from dense population centers, particularly in the eastern half of the nation. No wonder Colorado, Montana and Idaho are so picturesque — watch and you’ll see what I mean.

Georgia’s contribution is substantial, which shouldn’t be surprising in light of the fact that we’ve got three of the biggest carbon-belching coal-fired power plants in the country. Scientists say the methods used to create the video could be employed to provide real-time monitoring of CO2 emissions, pinpointed to the source.

(Thanks to Andrew Revkin of the New York Times for spotting this.)

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