You are browsing the archive for April 2015 - Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal.
30 April 2015
U.S. Seismic Network Sees Nepal Quake
A big hat tip to IRIS for this. Keep in mind that the shortest distance to Nepal from the U.S. is over the North Pole, so the seismic waves come from that direction. From IRIS: IRIS Ground Motion Visualization for the M7.9 earthquake in Nepal April 15, 2015. The visualization shows EarthScope seismic stations picking up the seismic waves generated from the earthquake. Red stations mean the station is …
The View From A Window at Le Gras Keeps Changing How We See the World
You must admit, It’s not a very good photo, but there is good reason for that, because it’s the first one. Ever. Joseph Neipce took it in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes in France, and he called it “A view from a window at Le Gras”. That photo was made a few weeks after the death of Thomas Jefferson in the summer of 1826, and while it may not look like much the science …
27 April 2015
Was Your Record High Temperature A Result of Climate Change? Probably.
A paper in Nature Climate Change today is getting international press and for good reason, It contains a rather astounding statistic. Here is a quote from the beginning of the paper with my highlights in red: Climate change includes not only changes in mean climate but also in weather extremes. For a few prominent heatwaves and heavy precipitation events a human contribution to their occurrence has been demonstrated1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Here we …
25 April 2015
Where To Get Some Good Science on The Nepal Quake
I thought I would put together a few links to some good early science reporting on the Nepal Quake. First up is Dave Petley’s Landslide Blog here on the AGU Blogosphere. Dave has some good basic facts on the quake. The Washington Post has a good piece that quotes Geologist Roger Bilham who is an expert on quakes in this region, and he says that this was a severe quake …
23 April 2015
Amazing Time-Lapse of Calbuco Volcano in Chile
This video speaks for itself: Check out the image at sunset from the NY Times twitter feed. Also Andy Revkin has more info here.
22 April 2015
The Earth on Earth Day
I remember very well watching the CBS Evening News 45 years ago on the first Earth Day. It was a major story, and I believe Walter Cronkite led the broadcast with it. We know a lot more about our planet now than we did then, and there have been some amazing successes in protecting our environment. We now know something that was not well understood then, and that is the …
19 April 2015
Welcome To Oklahoma, The State of Denial
Just as I started putting together this post tonight, I had an instant message from my daughter in Oklahoma City. It said one word “EARTHQUAKE”. This has become the standard practice, where she messages me, and I let her know within a few minutes where the quake was, and what the magnitude was. We have our own intensity scale that ranges from “I barely felt it” to “It felt …
14 April 2015
Climate Denial Disappearing Among TV Weathercasters
A new study by George Mason University shows something that a lot of us who work in broadcast meteorology have noticed- the rapid disappearance of climate change deniers among TV weathercasters. I’m not the only one who has noticed it, because I frequently hear talk about it from colleagues at various conferences. It’s very rare to hear ridiculous pronouncements about climate change from TV weathercasters these days, but it was far different …
13 April 2015
Spring Marches North: The View from Space
This is from the NASA Aqua satellite. You can see the green of spring moving into Virginia, while snow remains in the Adirondacks. High resolution, color imagery from polar orbiting satellites allows folks like me to better tell the story of our planet to our TV audience and to our online viewers as well.
10 April 2015
Amazing Temperature Change Over The Mid-Atlantic Friday
Here are two maps showing the temperatures at 5 Am and 4 PM. Many areas saw a rise of over 34 degrees in just a few hours today. This rapid change in temperature was made possible by two things. Ocean and elevation. At sunrise a chilly easterly wind off the cold Atlantic (where water temps are only around 42 degrees) had pushed all the way to the Blue Ridge Mountains …
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.