You are browsing the archive for April 2014 - Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal.
30 April 2014
NWS Weather Radar Upgrade Proving Wildly Successful
It was near midnight last night (April 28, 2014) when a strong super-cell storm developed an intense rotation as it approached Birmingham, AL (with a population of over a million people). Tornadoes are hard to spot at night (and they can often be wrapped in rain) making them invisible until it’s too late to take cover. While Doppler radar has made it possible to see this rotation inside a storm, …
29 April 2014
Death Toll Mounting In Deep South
Below is what the radar image showed. The blue is wind toward the radar and the red is away from the radar. Virtually all of the tornadoes were inside the moderate risk area issued by the Storm Prediction Center. Severe weather forecasting has improved dramatically over the last 30 years.
28 April 2014
Major Severe Weather Outbreak Underway In Plains/Southeast
A strong low pressure system is really winding up in the Plains this Sunday evening, and winds are gusting to 48 mph behind dry line front through Oklahoma and Texas. Ahead of the dry line, a moist and extremely unstable airmass is in place, and storms have already developed. Keep in mind that tornadoes require both unstable air AND strong low-level wind shear, and there is plenty of both in …
24 April 2014
Oh, The Things You Can See From On High
I spent a little while looking at today’s images from NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites with their amazing MODIS imager that sends back true colour images from an altitude of around 700 km. Here are a few things I spotted in just a short period of browsing this evening. Click any image for a much larger view. Here is a view of just some Sahara sand blowing north into Greece …
21 April 2014
More About The Guy Who Almost Poisoned The Planet (As Seen on COSMOS Sunday Night)
If you saw COSMOS Sunday night, (20 April) then you might be fascinated by the story of Thomas Midgley who invented lead additives for gasoline, and formed the Ethyl Corporation. Neil deGrasse Tyson used the entire episode to tell the story Clair Patterson who discovered the age of the Earth. In doing so, he also discovered that the lead additives in the gasoline were burning slowly poisoning all plant and …
18 April 2014
Suomi Satellite Night Vision Sees Great Lakes Ice
The CIMMS Satellite blog has posted a fantastic image of the ice cover on the Great Lakes. See my previous post for more info. This is a visible light (not IR) image made by the VIRRS sensor on Suomi is below: (click for full resolution)
Great Lakes Ice Unprecedented? Hardly.
The headline above is on the Huffington Posts front page this evening, and it’s rather misleading. Yes, it’s been a rather cold winter around the Great Lakes and a cold spring has slowed the ice melt as well. It’s really not that big of a deal however, and the claim that this will affect the environment for years is more than dubious. The ice was worse in the cold winters …
16 April 2014
Can’t Get Enough of Cosmos? Netflix Has 6 Hours of Neil deGrasse Tyson
I have mentioned the lectures you can buy from the Teaching Company before here, and one of those lecture sets is a six lecture series called The Inexplicable Universe, by Neil deGrasse Tyson. It’s worth the money IMHO, but before you buy it, Netflix has made available this entire series for its customers. That’s a pretty good deal. Now, this series does not have all the flash bang the COSMOS …
15 April 2014
New Research Shows Asian Soot Cloud Affecting Pacific Storms
A group of researchers from Texas A & M University have a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) this week that is getting a lot of attention. Cloud droplets and rain drops need something to form on, and without dust and other aerosols in the atmosphere we would see a lot less of both. Sometimes though, the addition of particulates can cause tiny cloud droplets …
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.