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You are browsing the archive for March 2013 - Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal.

30 March 2013

How To Tell If You Are About To See Baseball Size Hail.

I’m back in Oklahoma for a few days visiting with my daughter and her dog Sebastion (AKA Bashee). We had a nice thunderstorm cluster pop up to our northwest here in Oklahoma City, and I immediately knew that someone was about to get some very large hail. Take a look at the radar image above. I have red arrows pointing toward what meteorologists call a THREE BODY SCATTER SPIKE. This …

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27 March 2013

How not to prove you’re not wearing a tin foil hat.

  Do those who think climate science is a giant hoax or a conspiracy, also tend to have other conspiratorial type beliefs? A paper written back in 2010 attempted to answer that question: (Lewandowsky, S., Oberauer, K., and Gignac, G. E. in press). NASA faked the moon landing–therefore (climate) science is a hoax: an anatomy of the motivated rejection of science. Psychol. Sci. doi:10.1177/0956797612457686). The paper did indeed discover such a connection …

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25 March 2013

2013 Isaac Asimov Memorial Lecture Moderated By Neil de Grasse Tyson

The existence of nothing….

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24 March 2013

Motion To Dismiss The Indictment of Punxsutawney Phil

Motion for dismissal of Indictment  If it please the court, Your Honor, I would like to make a motion to dismiss the indictment for fraud against one Chuck Elles Groundhog (AKA Punxsutawney Phil) of Pennsylvania. I list my reasons below along with evidence that spring might really be just around the corner. Exhibit One: I know this may look like gobbeldy gook Your Honor, but the chart above is crucial to our motion. …

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23 March 2013

Bright Meteor Lights Up The Northeast U.S. Friday Night.

The video is courtesy of Hopkins Automotive in Salisbury, Maryland. They are just across from the WBOC-TV Newsplex, where our phones melted at 7:53 PM. It looks like it was probably over PA. or NJ since folks in CT. saw it in the southern sky. It broke up into three parts, and some folks reported a popping sound. Blue-green tail which may have been magnesium burning. We contacted NORAD and they  were not tracking …

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21 March 2013

New Research On The 1925 Tri-State Tornado-Longest Track on Record

Good piece here from KOTV Meteorologist Michael Grogan about the research into the Tri-State tornado of 1925. I grew up in Tulsa, and when I was young there were many people still alive who witnessed this tornado. It holds the record for the longest track of one tornado on record. I’ve always suspected that it was probably actually several tornadoes from one super-cell, but hopefully the research from NOAA Meteorologist …

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20 March 2013

How Much Will The Planet Warm If We Double CO2?

The Yale Forum on Climate Change and The Media has an excellent post up by Zeke Hausfather about climate sensitivity. It’s basically a “how we know what we know” piece on how much the planet will warm if we double the carbon dioxide levels in the Earth’s atmosphere. We are rapidly on our way to doing this, and well before the century is out. It’s well worth a read. Guest Post …

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18 March 2013

NASA’s Science Visualization Wall- Cool Is An Understatement.

I spent the weekend at the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University in Fairfax,Va. We started the weekend with a visit to the NASA’s science visualization wall. Scientific centers everywhere are building similar displays to see science data in a whole new way, and it’s without doubt leading to new discoveries about how the planet works. I saw some amazing images on this wall, and thanks to my Canon 5D I grabbed a few …

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13 March 2013

Arctic Storm Fractures Already Fragile Polar Ice

The National Snow Ice Data Center has an update on the Arctic Ice for February out this week. Look at what an Arctic low pressure system did to the ice in the Beaufort Sea. From the NSIDC: During the last couple of weeks of February, a broad area of sea ice has fractured off the coast of Alaska and Canada, extending from Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic to Barrow, Alaska. This …

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12 March 2013

Vote For NASA’s Most Amazing Pic

Over at the NASA Earth Observatory, they are having a contest to pick NASA’s most amazing space image. I can tell right now what my favourite is. The image below from the MODIS sensor on the Aqua Satellite. NASA’s mission is to explore and learn, but perhaps its greatest gift to the people of the Earth is (and has always been) inspiration. Go take a look and vote!

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