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Hurricane Juan
Fri Jun 11, 2004
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook. When Hurricane Juan struck Nova
Scotia last September, one man had a sound idea. Bob Henson tells us more.
DJ: We were east of the eye, so the strongest winds went right over our home. This is
what it sounded like for an hour…
BH: You’ve heard of storm chasers. Meet Dennis Jones—sound chaser. By day,
Jones works for the Canadian military as an acoustical physicist. In his spare time, he
makes high-quality recordings of natural phenomena.
DJ: I guess I have to attribute that just to my wife, who bought me a video camera with
very good audio capability. And when I started taking videos of wildlife, I realized, "Hey,
there’s great sound quality here."
BH: When Hurricane Juan approached the Halifax area, packing winds of 95 miles an
hour, Jones saw the acoustic chance of a lifetime.
DJ: We have a north-facing patio from our home and I left the screen patio door open
about a foot and a half. And no rain and no wind came into that patio all night long. It
was the perfect direction and orientation for the microphone.
BH: Along with the steady roar of the wind in the trees, Jones caught one dramatic
event on tape right from his own backyard.
DJ: All of the maples lost branches, but a very large one just ripped right off and I was
able to capture that on the audio recording.
BH: Jones also recorded a two-second rhythm he attributes to spruce trees and their
steady swaying in the wind. He got another test case in February , when Halifax got its
worst-ever blizzard by far. Now he’s comparing the so-called White Juan to Hurricane
Juan, which brought down millions of trees across Nova Scotia.
Bob Henson lives in Boulder, Colo. The Weather Notebook receives funding from the
National Science Foundation and Subaru of America. We are online at
weathernotebook.org where you can check out all of our past shows.
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