You are browsing the archive for November 2009 - Page 2 of 2 - Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal.
16 November 2009
NOAA October Temps- 6th warmest on record.
The October temperature anomalies are out. Notice how cool the USA was compared to the rest of the world. The three warmest Octobers on the instrumental record have come in the last 7 years. The most impressive and worrying sign on the anomalies map is the extreme warmth showing up in the highest latitudes. Although the argument has long since been discredited, you might still here a few say this …
13 November 2009
Mother Nature's Two For One Sale on Record Highs
Not that it will change any minds. The overwhelming evidence of the last decade has convinced all those it will I think, but just in case there are those who are just beginning to ask questions… A few months back, I was adding up the record highs and the record lows for some sample years in the 1990’s and 2000’s. A friend tipped me to the raw data. He told …
10 November 2009
Things I've Learned Talking To Cameras With Red Lights On Them
When I was a young, dumb undergraduate in Meteorology in the fall of 1977 at the University of Oklahoma, one of the first things I absorbed with great surprise was the inherent dislike of TV weathercasters among many meteorologists and meteorology students. It did not matter whether the TV person had a background in meteorology. (Back then many did not, it’s a bit better now) They still grumbled about how …
7 November 2009
The Breathing Earth
Many people are surprised when they first see a graph of the carbon dioxide levels measured at Mauna Loa in Hawaii. The first question asked is why is it going up and down each year? The answer is that you are looking the Earth breathing! There is much more land in the Northern Hemisphere than the Southern, and when spring arrives in the North, the growing plants suck CO2 out …
6 November 2009
Tomorrow is Carl Sagan Day
Tomorrow marks the first annual Carl Sagan Day. It will be held at Broward College in the Miami area of Florida. It will be celebrated by people around the world however, by simply pausing to reflect on the life of a man who brought the wonders of Science to millions. Sagan worried a lot about scientific literacy. To have a functioning society, where the public makes thoughtful decisions on everything …
4 November 2009
Sudden Mac Withdrawal
My Mac Book Pro crashed Monday night, and since my life is in one and zeros on it’s hard drive I’ve been going through a bit of withdrawal all week. (My wife would argue that it’s been a bit more than “a bit”). The good news is that it’s fixable and mainly free at that! The bad news is I am writing this post on a machine running some awful …
2 November 2009
What Really Crashed At Roswell
Roswell in New Mexico has made itself into the tourism mecca for those who believe we have been/are being visited by aliens. Thousands attend the annual UFO festival and just look at the artwork on the chamber of commerce web site! Countless TV shows with eyewitnesses and so called experts have looked into the reports that a flying saucer crashed into the desert near Roswell in July of 1947. It …
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.