According to a new study presented at the Seismological Society of America’s conference in Salt Lake City this week, scientists may have found a new way to not only track storms, but predict their path using seismic waves.
The study found that as Superstorm Sandy approached the coast last October, seismic vibrations were detected across the lower 48 states.
Hurricane Sandy swept northward a few hundred kilometers off the East Coast, hooked left, and then slammed into the shore just northeast of Atlantic City, New Jersey. Long before the storm struck land, however, minuscule vibrations triggered in Earth’s crust could be picked up on instruments onshore, says Oner Sufri, a seismologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. While some of the motions were produced by surf pounding beaches, a larger fraction came from large storm waves far offshore that smashed into each other.
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Storm-induced seismic vibes aren’t a newly recognized phenomenon. In 2005, ground motions triggered by Hurricane Katrina were picked up by seismometers in California. And even storms that remain far from land can trigger ground motions, Sufri and Koper note.
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Because the strongest ground motions are typically created at or near a storm, researchers can track its progress using seismic data alone. That offers opportunities for scientists to delve through old data sets—especially those from the presatellite era—to look for signs of storms that might have been missed by earthbound observers, or to better estimate their paths and intensities, Sufri says.
(Source)
