HOW TO CALCULATE THE RELATIVE POWER OF HURRICANES AND EARTHQUAKES

               From Worldometer (new  COVID-19 deaths yesterday):

        DAY  USA  WORLD   Brazil    India    South Africa

June     9    1093     4732         1185       246       82

July    22     1205     7128         1293      1120     572

Aug    12     1504     6556        1242        835     130

Sept     9     1208      6222       1136       1168       82

Oct     21     1225      6849         571        703       85

Nov    25      2304    12025        620        518      118

Dec    30      3880    14748       1224       299      465

Jan     14       4142    15512         1151        189       712              

Feb      3       4005    14265       1209       107      398

          25       2414    10578        1582        119      144

Mar     2        1989      9490       1726       110      194

          31       1115      12301        3950       458       58

April   6         906     11787         4211        631       37

May    4         853     13667         3025     3786      59 

         26         607     12348         2399     3842     101

June    1         287     10637        2346      3205      95

          30        249      8505        2127        991      383

July     7          251      8440         1595        817      411

         28          483    10136          1366       641      520 

Aug    3           516    10057         1238        561      555

           4           656    10120        1118         532      423

          11          614    10352         1123          519      573  

          18        1055   10574          985         511       384

          24        1134    10462         885         787      369

          25        1287   11301           901         608      516

          31        1232      8957          882        462      431

Summary:

• The USA leads in new deaths and new cases.
• Our 156,002 new cases yesterday dwarfs the rest of the world, with #2 being India at 43,072 and #3 the UK at 32,181.
• The top three states continue to be Florida with 18,608, California 17,790 and Texas 16,835.
• Georgia and Louisiana are the worst in per capita numbers, but Louisiana can be pardoned for yesterday not reporting anything.

America's longest war is over.  From the first bombing of the Taliban on 7October 2011, we are now out of Afghanistan after 19 years and 47 weeks.  We lost the war, but did evacuate 123,000.  In this particular war, 160,000 died, 50,000 of them civilians.

There are various ways to calculate how much we spent, but a good one is $2.261 trillion.  How much is this?  Jeff Bezo's new DC home cost him $23 million.  You could buy 100,000 of those.  Actually the post 9/11/01 Middle East wars have cost us $6.4 trillion.

Did we accomplish anything?  In Vietnam, some take comfort in that defeat, for we supposedly stopped communism in Southeast Asia.  In the Middle East?  Well, the price of oil was up to nearly $150/barrel in 2008 and is now one third to one half that cost at $50-$70/barrel.

Into the topic of today, hurricane strengths are easy to compare.  Just divide the weaker hurricane wind speed into the stronger one, and cube the quotient.   Once a tropical storm attains a wind speed exceeding 74 miles/hour for one minute, it becomes a hurricane.  There are also categories of hurricanes, with  Category 5 beginning at 157 MPH.  So let us see how much more powerful a 157 MPH Category 5 is compared with a 74 MPH Category 1:

157/74 = 2.12

2.12 x 2.12 x 2.12 = 9.6

Thus, a beginning Category 5 hurricane is almost 10 times more powerful than a budding Category 1 hurricane.

Earthquakes take a bit more mathematics.  I posted this article more than 11 years ago:

Example 1:  Say you want to compare a 6.0 M_w earthquake with a 7.0 M_w.  The difference is 1.0, so using a calculator with a X^Y key, place 10 in X and 1.5 (difference of one times 1.5) in Y, press the equal sign to get 31.6, so a 7.0 earthquake is 31.6 times more powerful than a 6.0.

If you don't have a calculator or computer, use the following table:

To compare two earthquakes, subtract the smaller one from the larger, then go to the number in the left column. The right column provides the power difference (ratio):

0.1..........1.4

0.2..........2.0

0.3..........2.8

0.4..........4.0

0.5..........5.6

0.6..........7.9

0.7........11.2

0.8........15.8

0.9........22.4

1.0.......31.6

1.1........44.7

1.2........62.8

1.3........89.4

1.4......125

1.5......169 

1.6......253

1.7.....354

1.8......500

1.9......702

2.0....1000

2.1....1414

2.2....1986

2.3....2828

2.4....3977

2.5....5617

2.6....7940

2.7..11,213

2.8..15,851

2.9..22,373

3.0..31,622 

4.0   1 million

Example 2:  Using the table above, the Chile 8.8 M_wearthquake is thus 354 times more powerful than the China (Yushu County) 7.1 M_w, because the difference is 1.7.

Example 3:  Central Oklahoma is worried about earthquakes.  They have kept track of 5.5 or greater earthquakes around the world from 1885 to 2015, and found three 5.5s that caused damages, the most severe was in Japan on 25July2003 costing $529 million.  I've been in a 5.5, and the building shook.  The largest earthquake ever was the Valdivia Earthquake of 1960 with magnitude of 9.5.  Conveniently, the difference of the two is exactly 4.0.  Looking at the above table, that strongest earthquake ever was one million times more powerful than those 5.5 magnitude earthquakes.  Yet, one of these 5.5 earthquakes caused damages of $232 billion.

What about that Great Chilean Earthquake of 1960?  Killed 1655, caused homelessness for 2 million, with damages less than a billion dollars, including $75 million from the Hilo Tsunami.  That 5.5 Japan earthquake mentioned above created a financial impact of almost as much, for brought up to 2021 dollars, the damages amounted to $744 million.

In 2015 another of my postings talked about movie earthquakes, including one at 10.5 magnitude and another at 10.0, which wiped out Los Angeles.  Thus the 10.5 earthquake would be 31.6 times more powerful than that 9.5 Chilean earthquake.  That 10.5:  Apocalypse movie earned a 50% audience rating from Rotten Tomatoes.

Here is a USGS source that also tells you how to do this, and you don't need to do any math.  So I tried it, and the largest number you could type-in was 10.  Thus that movie earthquake was disqualified from reality.

Finally, something from Volcano Discovery, which shows you a useful table using meaningful energy terms like joules, watt-hours and TNT equivalent.  It also showed something that I did not know existed.  You can have a negative magnitude earthquake.  

• -2.0 magnitude equals 63 joules, but is near zero for TNT equivalent..
• -1.0 magnitude equals 2000 joules and 0.5 grams of TNT.
• 0.0  magnitude equals 63,000 joules and 15 grams of TNT.
• 9.0 magnitude equals 2.0 times 10 to the 18th power joules and 500 million tons of TNT.
• The Hiroshima A-bomb was equal to only 20,000 tons of TNT.

I usually toss in a joke or something entertaining here, but I'm in a rush.  I'm soon due on a golf course.  Goodbye for today.

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