Sonic Boom heard in three UK counties

[Carl]

" "Loud explosions" heard across the east of England were caused by a sonic boom when a jet broke the sound barrier.
The noise, at 11:30 BST, caused shaking and smashed windows and prompted calls to police in Cambridgeshire, Essex and Hertfordshire.
The Ministry of Defence said a Typhoon jet from RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire was launched when communication was lost with a Heathrow-bound plane."


Yeah, right!

"Insp Matt Snow of Cambridgeshire Police said: "We've had reports of windows being smashed.

"One man who rang us from St Ives thought something had hit his roof because the whole house shook.

"It was so loud another person thought his neighbour's house had blown up.

"People have said they'd never heard anything so loud in their lives.

"Even people driving on the A14 have been calling us."


Pretty much speaks for itself


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-22926813

 

[Ca.]

It would appear the rocks are now coming down in clusters, and or larger meteors (a la Russia event replay) are disintegrating into formidable chunks to cause sonic booms, and shock waves.

Four Fireballs at Four in Last 24 Hours:19 MAY 2013
by Mike Hankey

In the last 24 hours the AMS has received confirmed reports about 4 unique fireball events all occurring near 4:00 AM UTC time. The most recent event occurred in Arkansas and Missouri on May 19th near 3:37 UTC. At the same time 3:37 UTC 4 witnesses reported a fireball in Arizona. The distance between these two locations would inhibit witnesses from observing the same fireball from both locations. On May 18th two large fireball meteors were also spotted within an hour of each other, one over the central east coast and another in Colorado. Below is a table of the events in question.
1082 2013-05-18 03:47 UTC South East -> North West CO
1081 2013-05-18 04:26 UTC South East -> North West CT, MD, NJ, NY, OH, PA, VA, WV
1083 2013-05-19 03:37 UTC South East -> North West AR, IL, IN, MI, MO, OH, TN
1084 2013-05-19 03:37 UTC South South East -> North North West

Memorial Day Fireballs: 27 MAY 2013
by Mike Hankey

Party goers on the East Coast were graced with two brilliant fireballs last night. The first bolide (event #1143) entered the atmosphere over north central PA around 9:05 PM Eastern time and was traveling from the east-south-east to the west-north-west. Click the trajectory map below to view the witness reports for this event.
The AMS also received 18 additional reports for a fireball on the East Coast approximately 3 hours later at 12:05 AM (event #1144). While the vectors for the 2nd sighting put the object much farther south initially it was not clear if this was a separate event or if a large volume of witnesses reported the wrong time (certainly possible on a holiday weekend). We have contacted some of these witnesses in an attempt to confirm the reported time and have verified this was in fact a separate event. Below is a map of the second fireball event.

Large Fireball Meteor with Sonics Over Ohio: 31 MAY 2013
by Mike Hankey

Over 200 witnesses reported a large fireball over Ohio last night around 11:05 PM local central time (3:05 UT). The fireball was seen from primarily Ohio and Indiana, but witnesses from West Virginia, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and North Carolina also reported seeing the fireball. Here is heat map for the event that shows where the witnesses reported from.

The AMS has developed technology that can plot the trajectory for any fireball reported to our system. The accuracy of these trajectories is dependent on the number of witnesses who report the event and their distribution around the fireball. This event provided a large volume and good geographic distribution of witnesses. Below is the trajectory estimate we plotted for this fireball.

Link For information with maps of the above from American Meteor Society, Fireballreport
_http://www.amsmeteors.org/

These are seven consecutive frames from the FireBall video by Jeremy Thomas
Published on May 20, 2013
_http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNP_nAjmNUo

Be aware that there is not more than 4 of 1/100th seconds between each frame, the camera was shooting at 30 frames per second, so if there is any sudden apparent change of dimension in any object in that period of time is because this object was exploiting.

Some people are claiming this to be an airplane of some type, mainly because in the second frame here you have something that kind of looks like two "wings" of a plane, but if you look carefully you will see there is no symmetry in this "wings", one is bigger than the other, at a different angle and in the next frame one of these "wings" gets separated from the main "body", etc, always remember that these are images taken at very small fractions of second from each other, so what do you think?

One important detail here is that these cams are very sensitive to the near infrared light, so a lot of this glowing could not have been even visible to the naked eye.

To get and idea from numbers, using the second camera video segment:

A fact: The object enters the screen at 22:38:31.01 and leave it at 22:38:32.31, so it takes 1.30 seconds to cross the field of view(FOV).

Now assuming that the field of view is 30 degrees by 20 degrees, a courtesy to user Thierry Legault: _http://www.youtube.com/user/thlegault, we can make some estimations using some elementary geometry:
1- If the object is at 500 feet high, then the longest side of the FOV at that high is 267 feet and the other side is 176 feet, so the diagonal of this rectangle is 320 feet, since the object moves almost along this diagonal its speed will be 320/1.3 = 246 feet per seconds, that translate in 168 miles per hour.
2- If the object is at 1000 feet high, then the speed will be 336 mph.

Original video here:
_http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw0bFl...

 

[Alada]

"One man who rang us from St Ives thought something had hit his roof because the whole house shook.

Yet the other location mentioned in the article, Great Gransden in Cambridgeshire, is about 300 miles from St Ives! Can a sonic boom from a jet travel that far and still be loud enough to be that notable in St Ives?

There’s a clip of the sonic boom heard in St Ives, where there does seem to be some jet engine noise following the initial boom but hard to say really from such a short snip really.

 

[ska]

Hi Alada

I think the article meant this St.Ives in Cambridgeshire, only about 10 miles away.
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a&q=st+Ives+cambs&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hq=&hnear=0x4877de154cca1d3f:0x69f8067c1280c809,St+Ives,+Cambridgeshire&gl=uk&sa=X&ei=hBS_UekBjfjSBaSBgfAK&ved=0CBwQ8gEoATAA