Trending Natural Disaster

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Excerpt from www.cbc.ca

Severe storms were tearing through the central and southeast U.S. late Tuesday and Wednesday, spawning damaging tornadoes, producing massive hail and killing two people in Tennessee and another in North Carolina.

A storm that rumbled across northeastern Tennessee brought high winds that knocked down power lines and trees. Claiborne County Sheriff Bob Brooks said a 22-year-old man was in a car struck by one of the trees.

Wednesday afternoon, a tornado emergency — the weather service’s highest alert level — was issued for an area south of Nashville including the towns of Spring Hill, Chapel Hill and Eagleville.

The U.S. National Weather Service had previously reported a likely tornado on the ground in nearby Columbia, Tenn., about 72 kilometres south of Nashville. People in Columbia were injured and homes were damaged, according to Lynn Thompson, assistant director of Maury County 911. Thompson told The Associated Press that he could not provide any further details: “We’re getting overloaded right now.”

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Excerpt from en.inform.kz

 Scientists detected ten powerful solar flares that erupted from the Sun over the past day, the Institute of Applied Geophysics has told TASS.

The first flare, ranked as category M1.3 flare, was detected at 12:48 a.m. Moscow time on Tuesday (9:48 p.m. Monday GMT), lasting 30 minutes. The last one, which occurred at 7:30 p.m. Moscow time (4:30 p.m. GMT), was also the most powerful of them all. Ranked as category M8.2, the flare continued for 15 minutes.

Some of those flares disrupted radio communications on the short wave.

Over the past few weeks, scientists have registered four solar flares of the highest X class (X1.7, X4.5 and two X1.3) and a large number of less powerful M-class flares.

Solar flares are divided into five classes according to their X-ray strength: the smallest ones are A-class, followed by B, C, M and X. A0.0 class is equal to the radiation energy found in the Earth’s orbit, 10 nanowatts per square meter. Each letter stands for a 10-fold increase in energy output. As a rule, the flares, known as giant explosions on the sun, send solar plasma into space, and the clouds of these charged particles can bring about geomagnetic storms when reaching the Earth.

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Excerpt from amp.theguardian.com

Extreme weather

Severe thunderstorms bring hail and structural damage, with tornadoes hitting cities including Kalamazoo and Battle Creek

Tornadoes that hit Michigan on Tuesday evening ripped the roof off a FedEx building in Portage, partially collapsing the structure and trapping 50 people inside, Kalamazoo county authorities said. Elsewhere in the state, thousands of residents are without power and face a deluge of hail and tornado warnings amid severe thunderstorms.

“TAKE COVER NOW,” the National Weather Service in Grand Rapids warned in a post directed at Portage residents on their Facebook page.