(Press-News.org) A visible image of Tropical Storm Toraji was captured on Sept. 3 at 02:10 UTC/Sept. 2 at 10:10 p.m. is it continued moving north past eastern China and approached southern Japan. The image was taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument that flies aboard NASA's Terra satellite. The image showed strong thunderstorms wrapped around the center of the tropical storm. Bands of thunderstorms wrapping into the center from the north extended over Kyushu. Kyushu is the third largest island of Japan and is farthest southwest of Japan's four main islands.
At 1500 UTC/11 a.m. EDT on Monday, Sept. 2, Toraji had maximum sustained winds near 35 knots/40 mph/64 kph, so it was a minimal tropical storm. It was located about 100 miles northwest of Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, near 27.7 north and 126.5 west. Toraji was generating 13-foot/3.9-meter-high seas. That day, infrared satellite data from the MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite showed strong bands of thunderstorms wrapping around the southeastern and eastern quadrant of the storm, and spinning into the low-level center of circulation. Aqua passed over Toraji on Sept. 2 at 1328 UTC/9:28 a.m. EDT.
By Monday, Sept. 3 at 1500 UTC/11 a.m. EDT, Toraji's maximum sustained winds increased to 50 knots/57.5 mph/92.6 kph. The strongest winds are in the northeastern quadrant of the storm. Toraji moved closed to Kyushu and was centered near 30.5 north and 129.3 east, about 172 nautical miles/198 miles/318 km south-southwest of Sasebo, Japan. Toraji is moving to the northeast at 9 knots/10.3 mph/16.6 kph.
Wind shear has increased from the southwest today, Sept. 3. A deep layered mid-latitude trough (elongated area of low pressure) located over the Yellow Sea has created strong vertical wind shear. Winds are blowing from the southwest at up to 30 knots/34.5 mph/55.5 kph.
Toraji is now expected to make landfall in Kyushu and move back over open waters in the Sea of Japan where it is expected to parallel the western coast of Japan. It is expected to begin interacting with mid-level westerly winds and the Baroclinic Zone and become extra-tropical later today.
According to NOAA, the Baroclinic Zone is a region in which a temperature gradient exists on a constant pressure surface. Baroclinic zones are favored areas for strengthening and weakening systems; barotropic systems, on the other hand, do not exhibit significant changes in intensity. Also, wind shear is characteristic of a baroclinic zone, and wind shear can tear tropical cyclones apart.
Between the increased wind shear from the southwest and the interaction with the land (Kyushu), Tropical Storm Toraji is not expected to intensify before making landfall.
INFORMATION:
Text credit: Rob Gutro
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
NASA satellite sees Tropical Storm Toraji's concentrated center approaching Japan
2013-09-04
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
From birth to death in 4 days: Kiko now a remnant low
2013-09-04
A lot of things happen over a holiday weekend, and while people in the United States were celebrating Labor Day weekend, the Eastern Pacific Ocean's Tropical Storm Kiko came and went. Satellite data captured Tropical Storm Kiko's birth on Sept. 1 and saw its remnants weakening on Sept. 3. As Kiko dissipates, another low pressure system is forming near the southwestern coast of Mexico.
NOAA's GOES-West satellite captured the life of Kiko from the time it became Tropical Depression 11 on Aug. 31. The depression formed about 500 miles/805 km west-southwest of the southern ...
Ease of access improves fruit and vegetable consumption
2013-09-04
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – Sept. 3, 2013 – Low-income communities have particular problems getting adequate fruits and vegetables because of limited access to supermarkets and farmers markets. A new study from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center shows that community-supported agriculture (CSA) programs may be a feasible approach for providing fresh fruits and vegetables to under-resourced communities.
Lead author Sara A. Quandt, Ph.D., a professor of epidemiology and prevention at Wake Forest Baptist, said that CSAs, which link consumers to a local farm's produce over a growing ...
The 'weakest link' in the aging proteome
2013-09-04
LA JOLLA, CA----Proteins are the chief actors in cells, carrying out the duties specified by information encoded in our genes. Most proteins live only two days or less, ensuring that those damaged by inevitable chemical modifications are replaced with new functional copies.
In a new study published August 29 in Cell, a team led by researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have now identified a small subset of proteins in the brain that persist for longer, even more than a year, without being replaced. These long-lived ...
Fires in Bolivia Aug. 31, 2013
2013-09-04
Fires burned throughout Bolivia in late August. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Aqua satellite captured this natural-color image on August 31, 2013.
Red outlines indicate areas where MODIS has detected high surface temperatures associated with actively burning fires. In many places, the smoke from these blazes is thick enough to completely hide the land surface below from the satellite sensor's view. In general, the smoke plumes blow toward the west and northwest.
Wildfires can occur naturally in Bolivia, but the widespread burning ...
Mayo Clinic restores disrupted heartbeat with regenerative intervention
2013-09-04
ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Mayo Clinic researchers have found a way to resynchronize cardiac motion following a heart attack using stem cells. Scientists implanted engineered stem cells, also known as induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, into damaged regions of mouse hearts following a heart attack. This regenerative approach successfully targeted the origin of abnormal cardiac motion, preventing heart failure. The findings appear in the September issue of the Journal of Physiology.
MULTIMEDIA ALERT: Video resources, including interviews with Drs. Terzic and Yamada, are available ...
September 2013 story tips
2013-09-04
FORENSICS – Mass grave detection . . .
Families of thousands of victims of social violence may gain closure, and killers may receive appropriate punishment, because of a suite of technologies able to locate clandestine graves. While investigators can find some graves, perhaps hundreds of thousands remain undiscovered. Researchers at the University of Tennessee's Forensic Anthropology Center and Oak Ridge National Laboratory are developing a method to discover graves using sensors, onboard satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles. [Contact: Ron Walli, (865) 576-0226; wallira@ornl.gov]
BIOENERGY ...
Insulin status is important determinant of weight reduction on vascular function
2013-09-04
(Boston) - Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) and Boston Medical Center (BMC) have found that among obese people who had lost considerable weight, those with high insulin levels--a marker of insulin resistance in the body--were the most likely to experience better blood vessel function following the weight loss. These findings appear online in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
Obesity has emerged as one of the most critical health care problems in the U.S. and worldwide with nearly 70 percent of the U.S. population currently ...
Scientists, practitioners, religious communities urge collaborative action to save our planet
2013-09-04
Big global questions face us, among them: How will we feed a growing global population without ruining the soil and polluting freshwater? Or meet our burgeoning energy demands while curbing the greenhouse gas emissions that fuel rising sea levels, flooding, drought, disease and wildfire? And what can we do to stem the extinction of thousands of other species that share the planet with us?
These daunting "environmental" problems are not only in the domain of ecologists and environmental scientists. Other natural scientists, social, behavioral and economic researchers, ...
Why parenting can never have a rule book
2013-09-04
September 3, 203 - Any parent will tell you that there is no simple recipe for raising a child. Being a parent means getting hefty doses of advice – often unsolicited – from others. But such advice often fails to consider a critical factor: the child. A new review of dozens of studies involving more than 14,600 pairs of twins shows that children's genetics significantly affect how they are parented.
"There is a lot of pressure on parents these days to produce children that excel in everything, socially and academically," says Reut Avinun of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. ...
Journal of Spinal Cord Medicine publishes Sept. conference issue
2013-09-04
West Orange, NJ. August 30, 2013. The September issue of the Journal of Spinal Cord Medicine focuses on, "The Changing Face of Spinal Cord Injury," the theme for the 2013 meeting of the Academy of Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) Professionals. Research articles address topics in urology, neuroscience, rehabilitation psychology, physiology, gastroenterology, and infectious disease. The conference dates are September 2-4 at Bally's Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. Conference abstracts are available for free download at: http://tinyurl.com/n95jnoy
The issue's lead article is a state-of-the-art ...