You Thought NASCAR Was Fast ...? This Thing is 100 times Faster

How fast can a NASCAR car really go?

Today, the fastest they can go is 202 mph. Currently with the restrictor plate carbs, they can go about 190, at tracks like Talladega and Daytona. Which they are tracks where you run wide open all the way around and is too fast for safety. Other tracks such as California (Auto Club Speedway) and Atlanta Motor Speedway they run about 200-205 mph.

A Nascar car can usually get up to about 200 miles per hour on a large track. However though, there is a thing called a restrictor plate that makes a Nascar car slow down. They use restrictor plates strictly as a safety matter so the car does not get thrown into the air because of all the air.

Well now what do you thing about Lightning....?

It is an atmospheric electrostatic discharge "spark" accompanied by thunder, which typically occurs during thunderstorms. From this discharge of atmospheric electricity, a leader of a bolt of lightning can travel at speeds of 140,000 miles per hour, and can reach temperatures approaching 54,000 Fahrenheit, hot enough to fuse silica sand into glass channels.

So what can you learn from a lightning ?

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Hurricane Irene

High above the Earth from aboard the International Space Station, astronaut Ron Garan snapped this image of Hurricane Irene as it passed over the Caribbean on Aug. 22, 2011.

The National Hurricane Center noted on Aug. 22 that Irene is expected to produce total rainfall accumulations of 5 to 10 inches across Puerto Rico, The Virgin Islands, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, the Southeastern Bahamas and The Turks and Caicos Islands. Isolated maximum amounts of rainfall may reach up to 20 inches.



Irene Makes Landfall Over New York

This GOES-13 satellite image is of Hurricane Irene just 28 minutes before the storm made landfall in New York City. The image shows Irene's huge cloud cover blanketing New England, New York and over Toronto, Canada. Shadows in Irene's clouds indicate the bands of thunderstorms that surrounded the storm.

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What Is Katia

Katia was a tropical storm gathering energy over the Atlantic Ocean, Katia is new on the rotating list of names for tropical storms and hurricanes; it replaces the name Katrina, which was retired after the 2005 hurricane season.

While parts of the East Coast and New England are still recovering from Hurricane Irene, a new storm is brewing in the Atlantic, Tropical Storm Katia. The TRMM satellite looked "under the hood" of the storm and saw heavy rainfall rates and towering clouds providing a clue that she was going to strengthen and may become a hurricane .

Katia began as an area of low pressure that had moved away from the coast of Africa south of the Cape Verde Islands in the central eastern Atlantic. Storms forming in this region are known as "Cape Verde" storms. They tend to be larger and stronger than average because of the open ocean and occur most often in August and September during the height of the hurricane season. Irene was a Cape Verde storm.

Katia is expected to continue on its current west-northwest track passing north of the Leeward Islands. It is also forecast to become a hurricane and possibly a major hurricane as it encounters warmer waters and reduced wind shear.

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Hurricane

In 2010, there were 14 named storms, of which 7 were hurricanes and 5 were major hurricanes (that is, category-3, 4 and 5 ones). Hurricane activity this year was about 1.5 times the median hurricane activity level.A hurricane is an intense tropical storm. Tropical storms form over warm tropical oceans when local sea surface temperatures are above 26.5°C (80°F) through a depth of at least 50 meters (160 ft). Under these conditions, evaporation from the ocean surface creates very high humidity in the atmosphere, which in turn generates thunderstorms.

A surefire way to kill a hurricane? Add something called “vertical wind shear” — essentially a change in wind speed and direction with height. It stops the storm from forming in its tracks by ripping it apart.  Another way to kill a hurricane? Whip up a wind across the deserts of northern Africa. Dust gets swept up into the air and helps damp down developing storms. (In fact, it’s the effect of the dust combined with vertical wind shear and super-dry air that’s the killer.)

There’s a school of thought that says that climate change should fuel more hurricanes and more intense ones, because as the planet warms, ocean waters warm and sea surface temperature rises.

In a paper published earlier this year in Science, Thomas R. Knutson, of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and co-authors suggest that we should expect an increase in the frequency of the strongest hurricanes in the Atlantic, roughly by a factor of two by the end of the century, despite a decrease in the overall number of hurricanes. “But we should not expect this trend to be clearly detectable until we near the end of the century, given a scenario in which CO2 [carbon dioxide] doubles by 2100.” The relationship will become more apparent as we improve our understanding and data and as the climate continues to warm.

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