Saturday, June 5, 2010

Huracan Stan






Hurricane Stan was the eighteenth named tropical storm and eleventh hurricane of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season. It was also the sixth of seven tropical cyclones (three hurricanes, two of them major, three tropical storms and one tropical depression) to make landfall in Mexico. Stan was a relatively weak storm that only briefly reached hurricane status.
It was embedded in a larger non-tropical system of rainstorms that dropped torrential rains in the Central American countries of Guatemala and El Salvador and in southern Mexico, causing flooding and mudslides that led to 1,638 fatalities. Throughout the affected countries, the storm left roughly $3.9 billion in damage.



Guatemala Earthquake 1976

Guatemala Earthquake 1976. "Mole track" across the soccer field at Gualan consisting of en echelon fissures and connecting pressure ridges along the trace of the Motagua fault.
Displacement at this locality is over 3 fRepaired offset irrigation canal that crossed a surface break of the Motagua fault. The concrete patch was made about mid- March. Left lateral offset of the fracture in the patched interval is shown by arrows. Photo by R.C. Bucknam, April 18, 1976.
Graphs showing measured horizontal displacement (below) and vertical displacement (above) along the 230 kilometer length of the observed surface rupture of the Motagua fault. Displacement across the fault is sinistral (left-lateral) and is almost entirely horizontal with the strike-slip component ranging up to 340 centimeters and averaging about 110 centimeters. Vertical displacements are variable and less than 30 percent of the horizontal displacements. Note the large lateral variations in both horizontal and vertical slip.
Southward along a row of trees offset about 3.25 meters in a sinistral sense where it is intersected by the Motagua fault. The amount of offset is indicated by the distance between the row of trees on the right and the stake at which the man points. The stake is aligned with the row of trees in the background. The fault here is a single fissure oriented perpendicular to the line of trees; there is no measurable vertical displacement.

Tropical Storm Agatha




Tropical Storm Agatha was a weak, but catastrophic tropical cyclone that brought widespread floods to much of Central America and was the deadliest tropical cyclone in the eastern Pacific since Hurricane Pauline in 1997.
The first storm of the 2010 Pacific hurricane season, Agatha originated from the Intertropical Convergence Zone, which is a region of thunderstorms across the tropics. It developed into a tropical depression on May 29, and dissipated on May 30, reaching top winds of 45 mph (75 km/h) and a lowest pressure of 1000 m.
It made landfall near the Guatemala–Mexico border on the evening of May 29. Agatha produced torrential rain all across Central America, which resulted in the death of one person in Nicaragua. In Guatemala, 152 people were killed and 100 left missing by landslides. 13 deaths also occurred in El Salvador. It soon dissipated over Guatemala.