Rare Tornado Strikes Venice, Italy

Rare Tornado in Venice

Credit: Still from YouTube video.

A tornado swept across Italy's historic island city of Venice at around 11 a.m. local time yesterday (June 12), leaving a trail of twisted debris and a shaken populace in its wake.

Videos and images posted on YouTube and splashed across the websites of local media outlets showed a large and menacing twister looming above picturesque tiled roofs and the historic seascapes for which the city is famed.

Tornadoes near the northern Italian coastal city are rare, but they have wreaked havoc in Venice in the past. On Sept. 11, 1970, one or more tornadoes ripped through the region, killing as many as 50 people. In Venice, the twister lifted a boat out of the water and slammed it back down again, killing at least 21 people, according to local media reports. Although the Mediterranean coast may not be famed for its tornadoes, Carbin said twisters can spin up just about anywhere. "There are hotspots, and of course in North America, we have the largest hotspots," Carbin said, "but tornadoes have been reported in England, France, Germany, Asia, Indonesia." A combination of warm air, moisture, a thunderstorm and layers of different winds in the atmosphere sets the stage for a twister. "Anywhere you can put those ingredients together, you can get a tornado," Carbin said.

ESA: Venice, the Floating city

The islands that make up the Italian city of Venice and the surrounding Venetian Lagoon are pictured in this image.

Snaking through the central districts is the Grand Canal, with the Santa Lucia train station at its northern end and the Saint Mark Basin at its southern end.

Zooming in, we can see water buses and taxis navigating the canal and gondolas docked along the edge.

The square island to the north is San Michele. Once a prison island, it became a cemetery when Napoleon’s occupying forces declared burial on the main islands unsanitary.

This image was acquired on 22 June 2008 by Ikonos-2, a commercial satellite that provides panchromatic and multispectral high-resolution imagery.

ESA is supporting Ikonos-2 as a Third Party Mission, which means that the Agency uses its multi-mission European ground infrastructure and expertise to acquire, process and distribute data from the satellite to its wide scientific user community.

Credits: European Space Imaging (EUSI)

How Venice Works

Venice Backstage. How does Venice work? from Insula spa on Vimeo.

3,000,000 tourists move through Venice each year. But when the tourists leave the city, 270,000 year-round residents stay behind, continuing their daily lives, which requires navigating an archipelago made up of 124 islands, 183 canals and 438 bridges.

How this complicated city works – how the buildings are defended from water, how the buildings stand on unsteady ground, how the Venetians navigate this maze of a city – is a pretty fascinating story.

These techniques have been worked out over Venice’s 1500 year history, and now they’re explored in a captivating 17 minute video produced by a Venetian government agency.

You can learn more about the inner life of this great city at Venice Backstage.

NASA ISS Image: Venice Lagoon

Solar cycle may drive Venice's floods

If you want to see Venice while keeping your feet dry, don't go when the sun has lots of spots. Peaks in solar activity cause the city to flood more often, apparently by changing the paths of storms over Europe.

Several times a year, but most commonly between October and December, Venice is hit by an exceptional tide called the acqua alta.

David Barriopedro at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, and colleagues were intrigued by studies showing the tides followed an 11-year cycle, just like the sun, showing peaks when the sunspots were most abundant.

They looked at hourly observations of sea level between 1948 and 2008, which confirmed that the number of extreme tides followed peaks in the solar cycle (Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres, DOI: 10.1029/2009JD013114).

Global Warming: Flooding in Venice

Flooding: Half of Venice underwater

The city has for years been wrestling with the problems posed by the threat of rising sea levels. Last year local authorities confirmed they were looking at a scheme to raise the city's buildings to meet the problem.

Much of the historic Italian city of Venice, including St. Mark's Square, was underwater Monday following a meteorological depression combined with natural tide waters, officials said.

The tide monitoring centre said 45 percent of the Renaissance city was swamped when the lagoon rose 131 centimetres (more than four feet).

Venice was flooded 50 times between 1993 and 2002, with the worst 'acqua alta' on November 4, 1966, when the city was submerged by 1.94 metres of water amid catastrophic flooding throughout the country.

In February 1986, levels reached 1.58 metres above normal, and in December 2008 waters surged 1.56 metres.

The city has for years been wrestling with the problems posed by the threat of rising sea levels. Last year local authorities confirmed they were looking at a scheme to raise the city's buildings to meet the problem.

Under Operation "Rialto", local officials and engineers were looking at using piston-supported-poles placed at the bottom of each structure to lift buildings by up to a metre.

In April 2007, the United Nations cultural organisation UNESCO warned that Venice was one of its designated World Heritage sites that was threatened by climate change.

Lost Roman City Found: Ancient Venice

Shown here is part of the infra-red scan of a hidden city, rediscovered not far (7KM) from the calm waters of Venice.

Click on the picture above, and you will see an animated flyover, giving a bird's eye view of the city.

Aerial photos have given a detailed view of the ancient Roman city of Altinum, sometimes described as the ancestor to Venice, thanks to its complex network of canals and rivers.

The ancient foundations of the city have recently been rediscovered near Marco Polo Airport, north of Venice, during excavation work.

The ruins have been examined with a combination of visible and near-infrared photos of the area taken during a drought in 2007, which made many of their features much better defined and more visible.

The picture below is an artistic representation of some of the clearly defined features seen in the infra red imaging. It certainly appears to have been a bustling and prosperous city, which begs the question as to what became of it?

The full study is published in the journal Science but a synopsis can be read in Science Now magazine by Clicking on the Picture below.