In a report issued on Good Friday, Reuters says that the final casualty figure in Madagascar from Cyclone GAMANE in that week was 18 killed and thousands displaced.
Tropical cyclone Gamane, which crossed the northeast of Madagascar on Wednesday and Thursday, displaced more than 20,000 people, the National Bureau of Risk and Disaster Management (BNGRC) said in a report. Three others were injured and four were still missing, it added.
Gamane made landfall north of Vohémar in northeast Madagascar on Wednesday morning with average winds of 150 km per hour and gusts of 210 km per hour, BNGRC said late on Thursday.
It slowly dissipated on Thursday afternoon while still over land, the disaster management office said, having dumped heavy rain and caused flooding in many localities.
Roads and bridges collapsed in the north of Madagascar, BNRGC said.
Photographs posted on the disaster management office’s Facebook page showed its personnel wading in knee-deep water as they helped residents retrieve belongings from their flooded homes.
Gamane is the first this year in Madagascar’s cyclone and storm season.
Early last year, cyclone Freddy and tropical storm Cheneso killed at least 37 people and forced thousands from their homes.
It seems to have been big earthquake season this last two weeks. Of course, every day GDACS reports about 30 shakes of magnitude 5 or less, so earthquakes are not rare. But there have been a few more severe quakes reported.
The previous week there were strong quakes in Papua New Guinea, and off the coast of Indonesia. This week, a coastal area of Taiwan has been struck, and, as I write this on Friday evening, news of a medium strength earthquake in New York has just started to filter through.
Apparently a magnitude 4.8 quake struck the east coast of the US at about 17h20 CAT this Friday afternoon. It was felt from Philadelphia to Boston. Air traffic was immediately stopped, and only resumed about an hour later.
A magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck just south east of the coast of Taiwan at 23h58 UTC on the 2nd April at a depth of 11.4km and 13km off the coast exposing a local population of 230000 to danger. GDACS reported nine deaths, 52 people still missing, over a thousand injured, and more than 130 still trapped in rubble.
A minor tsunami alert was issued and nearby Japanese and Philippine islands were placed on alert, but the wave measured 1.6 metres or less.
More than 300 aftershocks of up to magnitude 6.4 have been reported.
Hackaday.com notes that, in the past few years we’ve seen the rise of low-power mesh networking devices for everything from IoT devices, weather stations, and even off-grid communications networks. These radio modules are largely exempt from licensing requirements due to their low power and typically only operate within a very small area. But by borrowing some ideas from the licensed side of amateur radio, Peter Fairlie built a Meshtastic repeater which can greatly extend the range of his low-power system.
Peter is calling this a “long lines relay” after old AT&T microwave technology, but it is essentially two Heltec modules set up to operate as Meshtastic nodes, where one can operate as a receiver while the other re-transmits the received signal. Each is connected to a log-periodic antenna to greatly increase the range of the repeater along the direction of the antenna. These antennas are highly directional, [and pointing in opposite directions], but they allow Peter to connect to Meshtastic networks in the semi-distant city of Toronto which he otherwise wouldn’t be able to hear.
With the two modules connected to the antennas and enclosed in a weatherproof box, the system was mounted on a radio tower allowing a greatly increased range for these low-power devices. If you’re familiar with LoRa but not Meshtastic, it’s become somewhat popular lately for being a straightforward tool for setting up low-power networks for various tasks.
Including, I may add, emergency communications. I know HAMNET in various provinces is experimenting with Meshtastic low power radio networks.
CP24.com says that NASA wants to come up with an out-of-this-world way to keep track of time, putting the moon on its own souped-up clock.
It’s not quite a time zone like those on Earth, but an entire frame of time reference for the moon. Because there’s less gravity on the moon, time there moves a tad quicker – 58.7 microseconds every day actually – compared to Earth. So the White House Tuesday instructed NASA and other U.S agencies to work with international agencies to come up with a new moon-centric time reference system.
“An atomic clock on the moon will tick at a different rate than a clock on Earth,” said Kevin Coggins, NASA’s top communications and navigation official. “It makes sense that when you go to another body, like the moon or Mars that each one gets its own heartbeat.”
So everything on the moon will operate on the speeded-up moon time, Coggins said.
The last time NASA sent astronauts to the moon they wore watches, but timing wasn’t as precise and critical as it is now with GPS, satellites and intricate computer and communications systems, he said. Those microseconds matter when high tech systems interact, he noted.
Last year, the European Space Agency said Earth needs to come up with a unified time for the moon, where a day lasts 29.5 Earth days.
The International Space Station, being in low Earth orbit, will continue to use coordinated universal time or UTC. But just where the new space time kicks in is something that NASA has to figure out. Even Earth’s time speeds up and slows down, requiring leap seconds.
Unlike on Earth, the moon will not have daylight saving time, Coggins said.
The conspiracy theorists in North America seem to have drummed up a concern that cell phone coverage will be affected by Monday’s Eclipse. Cell phones use radio, after all, and we all know that radio waves are affected by an ionospheric disturbance.
Well, the good news is that the most likely disruption of cell phone coverage will be caused by excited people phoning each other to ooh and aah over the eclipse! Signals at about 900 MHz go straight through the ionosphere anyway, and cell phone towers rely on line-of-sight communications, all parallel to the earth’s surface to allow phone calls.
I doubt whether the eclipse will get in the way of those much, and certainly not very likely in South Africa.
This is Dave Reece ZS1DFR reporting for HAMNET in South Africa.