You are browsing the archive for December 2011 - Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal.
30 December 2011
Those Inconvenient Numbers Just Keep Adding Up
With the year ending in a matter of hours now, it seems like a good time to add up some of the climate numbers along with some perspective. The first little tidbit is the NCDC record of record highs versus record lows. This year’s numbers show the trend of record highs far outpacing record lows continues. Notice the number of record high overnight lows, versus record lows, is running nearly …
28 December 2011
50% Off Silly
Spotted in a grocery store in Oklahoma City on Christmas Eve. Does this mean OU/OSU football fans are more likely to believe a 30 cent piece of plastic can work magic?? Being an Oklahoma boy, Texas I could understand 😉
26 December 2011
90% of The Big Fish Are Gone- Sylvia Earle Oceanographer
I heard an interview this morning on the BBC World Service with Sylvia Earle, the renowned oceanographer. She talked about the “grave threat” our oceans are in, and mentioned several basic facts that few people are aware of. You can listen to the 23 minute interview by clicking the image below, and It’s well worth your time. A significant minority of people believe the oceans are far to vast for …
24 December 2011
Happy Christmas from Above and Beneath an Oklahoma Sky
There is a great video from the ISS as well below. Take a look at a comet rise. NASA has more on it here. Last, but not least, the white barked sycamore trees are beautiful beneath a deep blue Oklahoma winter sky. The only Christmas gift I can give to everyone who drops by here is a photo. So, below is something you perhaps might like as a screen saver, …
22 December 2011
High Plains Blizzard
There is an old saying in the Plains (including Oklahoma), that in the winter  there is nothing between you and the North Pole but two barbed wire fences. It can really feel that way, when the wind comes down the plains, and the wind chill drops to the single digits. The Plains were hit by a real blizzard earlier this week and sadly I missed it! I’m in Oklahoma for …
Last Minute Gifts For That Science Geek You Know
My wife tells me that I should have written this post three days ago, because that is Christmas “last-minute” in her mind. Being a guy, last-minute is closing time on Christmas Eve, so here we go with a few gift ideas for someone who likes to learn new things! Fair warning up front, though, these ideas are going to be a bit lame for your Uncle Ralph who has a …
17 December 2011
Magic Clouds In The Magic City!
Birmingham, Alabama is known as the magic city, and they had a magical cloud display yesterday to go along with the name! I have mentioned Kelvin-Helmholtz waves before on this blog, but there was an AMAZING display of them yesterday in Birmingham. I’m talking a jaw dropping display. These clouds look like sculpted waves in the ocean and are caused by strong wind shear (especially a change in velocity) …
14 December 2011
Slowing Down A Light Beam With A Camera That Shoots A Trillion Frames Per Second
There is an amazing video out tonight on YouTube from the MIT Media Lab. They’ve developed a camera that can make an exposure of only two trillionths of a second! We all know light travels about 300,000 km each second, and that breaks down to about 300 meters in a millionth of a second. This means it’s possible with this camera to make a movie of a light beam moving …
The Things Hydrogen Atoms Can Do… If Given 13.7 Billion Years
With the announcement today that the scientists at CERN have found some tantalising hints of the Higgs Boson, it’s a good time to repost this TED talk from UK Astrophysicist Brian Cox. The basics of the standard model are not that difficult to understand, and if Brian Cox leaves you wanting more, I have some links to some superb books for non scientists (and meteorologists!) on a post I wrote …
11 December 2011
Stephen Schneider Memorial Lecture at AGU in San Francisco
Thanks to Bud Ward at the Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media, I was in the audience at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco when Dr. Richard Alley (His book the Two Mile Time Machine is a MUST read) was given the Stephen Schneider Memorial Award for Climate Science Communication. Stephen Schneider spoke at Climate ONE in 2009, and the video below was produced from that talk, and …
Dan Satterfield has worked as an on air meteorologist for 32 years in Oklahoma, Florida and Alabama. Forecasting weather is Dan's job, but all of Earth Science is his passion. This journal is where Dan writes about things he has too little time for on air. Dan blogs about peer-reviewed Earth science for Junior High level audiences and up.