Once again, news seems to synchronize.
First, in my reading pile was an interesting blog post at Wired on a possible new way to monitor hurricane strength:
An MIT engineer has a radical idea for determining just how strong a hurricane is: Analyze the sound of its roar, recorded by hydrophones 800 meters under the surface, to calculate the speed of its winds.[...]
In a paper accepted by Geophysical Research Letters, Nicholas Makris, director of MIT’s Laboratory for Undersea Remote Sensing, describes how new analysis of Hurricane Gert’s fortuitous 1999 passage over a hydrophone provides the first real-world proof that his theory could work under real conditions.
That “gift from God” provided Makris with his first field recording of a hurricane’s oceanic acoustic signature. Comparing his theoretical model with actual sound and wind data measured by an aircraft allowed Makris to calculate the acoustic signatures of various wind speeds. In effect, dropping hydrophones in front of advancing hurricanes could create a low-cost hurricane measurement system.
For additional coolness, you may want to visit the post at Wired. There’s an embedded sound player at the site which permits you to listen to a sample of what a storm sounds like underwater.
(Note that your computer’s sound system needs a certain amount of studliness to actually hear the sound. I couldn’t hear anything through my laptop’s speakers or cheap earbuds, but a high-quality pair of headphones rendered the sound audible.)
Of course, the west coast can’t be outdone when it comes to the sounds of natural hazards. Consider this wire service story:
Scientists listening to underwater microphones have detected an unusual swarm of earthquakes off the central Oregon Coast.
Scientists don’t know what the earthquakes mean, but they could be the result of magma rumbling underneath the Juan de Fuca Plate - away from the recognized earthquake faults off Oregon, said geophysicist Robert Dziak of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, Ore.[...]
It looks like what happens before a volcanic eruption, except there are no volcanoes in the area, Dziak said.[...]
On the hydrophones, the quakes sound like low rumbling thunder and are unlike anything scientists have heard in 17 years of listening, Dziak said. Some of the quakes have also been detected by earthquake instruments on land.
The hydrophones are leftover from a network the Navy used to listen for submarines during the Cold War. They routinely detect passing ships, earthquakes on the ocean bottom and whales calling to each other.
No word yet on when the SciFi channel will commission and air one of their “SciFi Special” movies on a new Pacific Coastal megavolcano. 
