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How Do Hurricanes Form?

Hurricanes are the most violent storms on Earth. People call these storms by other names, such as typhoons or cyclones, depending on where they occur.

The scientific term for ALL of these storms is tropical cyclone. Only tropical cyclones that form over the Atlantic Ocean or eastern and central Pacific Ocean are called “hurricanes.”

Whatever they are called, tropical cyclones all form the same way.

Tropical cyclones are like giant engines that use warm, moist air as fuel. That is why they form only over warm ocean waters near the equator. This warm, moist air rises and condenses to form clouds and storms.

As this warmer, moister air rises, there’s less air left near the Earth’s surface. Essentially, as this warm air rises, this causes an area of lower air pressure below.

This starts the ‘engine’ of the storm. To fill in the low pressure area, air from surrounding areas with higher air pressure pushes in. That “new” air near the Earth’s surface also gets heated by the warm ocean water so it also gets warmer and moister and then it rises.

As the warm air continues to rise, the surrounding air swirls in to take its place. The whole system of clouds and wind spins and grows, fed by the ocean’s heat and water evaporating from the surface.

As the storm system rotates faster and faster, an eye forms in the center. It is vey calm and clear in the eye, with very low air pressure.

Tropical cyclones usually weaken when they hit land, because they are no longer being “fed” by the energy from the warm ocean waters. However, when they move inland, they can drop many inches of rain causing flooding as well as wind damage before they die out completely. 

There are five types, or categories, of hurricanes. The scale of categories is called the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale and they are based on wind speed.

How Does NASA Study Hurricanes?

Our satellites gather information from space that are made into pictures. Some satellite instruments measure cloud and ocean temperatures. Others measure the height of clouds and how fast rain is falling. Still others measure the speed and direction of winds.

We also fly airplanes into and above hurricanes. The instruments aboard planes gather details about the storm. Some parts are too dangerous for people to fly into. To study these parts, we use airplanes that operate without people. 

To learn more about how we study hurricanes, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hurricanes/main/index.html

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

Things auto-tagged ‘Jungle Gym’ on Flickr

Flickr has introduced auto-tagging, aided by Machine Learning (I checked that it is with ML and found this Yahoo machine learning presentation). The user response has been quite negative so far, this Flickr forum post has a lot of angry pro users having to correct thousands of photographs for inexact tagging. Flickr openly say they want people to correct their tags because that will further help train their ML algorithms. 

Alex Hern of the Guardian wrote about some contentious cases such as when people have been auto-tagged ‘ape’ and when concentration camps get tagged ‘sport’ and ‘jungle gym’. In isolation these cases seem really outrageous so I did a search for ‘jungle gym’ and found many false positives, painting a much more systemic problem; it seems Flickr’s strategy is to auto-tag as much as possible, forcing their users, often not bothered about tags, to respond by curating a better set of tags for each image. So the bigger strategy seems to pitch machine learning against human labour in an attempt to make their algos smarter and their image service perfectly tagged. 

I can not argue with that

Monster Feels. GIF Painting by Sarah Zucker, 2017.

Example-based Face Stylization - Web Demo

DCGI and Adobe Research have put up an online interactive demo of their stylized facial animation paper.

Just drag and drop an image with a face into it, select one of the styles on the right, hit ‘Submit’ and see what happens …

Try it out for yourself here

When ur in public and have to pretend not to be anxious 

SP. Augmented Reality. Psycho-Pass (2012)

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