Yesterday was a strange day if you lived in South Jersey. Folks from Delaware all the way up to Atlantic City felt a strange tremor but no one would seem to figure out where it came from.
For those who don’t know, roughly around around 1:20pm on February 8th, we started receiving reports that people in our area had experienced some kind of seismic event.
In a usual situation when a seismic event takes place, the United States Geological Survey, puts up a notification about said event. Their machines didn’t record any seismic movement in our area that would have caused such a jolt.
Volcano Discovery confirmed a seismic event off the coast of Puerto Rico but that would be too far away for New Jersey to feel it.
Once it was ruled out that the movement didn’t come from underground, folks started looking to the skies.
Naval Air Station Atlantic City normally conducts air training just off our coast which sometimes causes sonic booms. In this case, NAS Atlantic City said that none of their planes were in the area. (Confirmed by the FAA)
There had been a rumor that an Aero L-39 Albatros plane had been flying over Stone Harbor at that time but the plane was flying under the speed required for a sonic boom to take place.
Fox 29’s meteorologist Kathy Orr may have given us the answer we have been looking for.
According to Orr, the boom may have been weather related. Orr says that a powerful jet streak, a strong push of air inside the jet stream passed over South Jersey and Delaware.
This jet streak and another disturbance in the mid-level atmosphere just north of New Jersey may have caused some loud booms due to a temperature inversion.
Orr says that“A temperature inversion happens when warm air is in the upper atmosphere while colder air is at the surface.”
Due to this split, the sound gets trapped in the lower cold air. This sound then bounces off the top of the surface air and and travels back down to the ground. (think of it as like an echo down a well. The sound keeps bouncing all the way down)
Any sound that happens in the atmosphere would come down to the ground would be trapped and would travel farther than normal.
This was just a guess for Orr but do you agree with it?
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