You are browsing the archive for October 2013 - Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal.
31 October 2013
Sign of The Times: Popular Science Closes Website Comments
First ,it was the LA Times who (earlier this month) announced that letters calling climate change a hoax or conspiracy would no longer be published. Now, Popular Science has announced that reader comments will no longer be allowed on most news stories. Here’s why in their own words: “A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from …
30 October 2013
Sandy A Year Later- A Lot of Lessons Learned and Knowledge Gained
My friend Bob Henson at the National Center for Atmospheric Research has a great piece on Atmos News about Sandy today. NCAR has published some amazing high-resolution model runs of Sandy, and in some ways Sandy actually behaved like a tornadic super-cell. The model runs show that as Sandy approached a cold front, it tilted tubes of rotation air from the horizontal to the vertical. This same thing happens in …
27 October 2013
The Big UK Windstorm You Will Hear About Tomorrow
There are some signs that the low may not reach quite the intensity earlier, but I would not count on that. It may indeed may be one of the strongest storms in quite sometime in Britain. Matt Taylor’s weather broadcast on the BBC is below: Click image to see it. Below is the GFS Model for 3 AM Tuesday morning. The height of the storm will likely be Monday night. …
22 October 2013
Hey China, How’s That Clean Coal Working Out For You!
It’s much worse on the ground of course. Check out this report from the BBC: I guess this Christmas might not be a good time to bring back the clean coal carolers. Also see this post. Something to remember the next time you see those slick adverts from the coal council on your fave cable news outlet… Here is another 500 meter resolution shot from Terra Sat.
21 October 2013
Free Online Course On Climate Change Starts Monday Oct 21
I’ve mentioned before here that one of the best books to read if you are wanting to understand the basic science behind the IPCC Climate predictions is David Archer’s Understanding The Forecast (The link is to the 2nd edition e-book). This book is a step up from most of the popular science books on the subject, and assumes that your eyes don’t glaze over if you see an algebraic equation. …
19 October 2013
Apollo 13: A Very Delayed Movie Review
A lot of science blogs have mentioned the science errors in the film Gravity recently, but this is a movie review on Ron Howard’s Apollo 13. Yes, I know the film came out 18 years ago, but better late than never! You see Gravity is a made up story, and while the errors are pretty egregious, I do not think it matters as much, because after all, it is a …
Improving Weather Forecasts
I mentioned this subject in the previous post about my talk at the AGU in Washington, and now Rand Corporation has an interesting piece about the subject as well. I’m convinced that the biggest problem with weather forecasts to the public is not their accuracy, but in the delivery and interpretation. Educating meteorologists (and the public), is perhaps more important than actually improving our numerical weather prediction capability! The delivery …
14 October 2013
The Coastal Storm That Never Ends
Here on the Delmarva, we’ve had 4 days of rain and a lot of it. Over 4.6 inches here in Salisbury, but parts of Delaware have had well over 6 inches. The wind hasn’t been anything like Sandy, or even a strong nor’easter, but it’s been blowing steady at 20-35 mph for four days! Waves and tides are affected by three factors however. 1.Wind Speed (How high are the winds) …
12 October 2013
Communicating Science- My Talk at The AGU in Washington
I was asked a few months back to talk about science communication at the AGU in Washington, and they recorded the talk. You can watch it below. A note about the graph I showed from Skeptical Science. It was actually made by Environmental Scientist Dana Nuccitelli for Skeptical Science (see this post). I shot the video in Antarctica and Greenland, but video-journalist David Wood down in Huntsville was the extremely …
10 October 2013
LA Times- You’re Entitled To Your Climate Change Conspiracy Theory, But We Aren’t Printing It
I’ve always gotten some rather crazy comments when I do a post on climate change. My comment policy here requires a name, and if you make a claim, I reserve the right to ask for some hard evidence. This usually means the conspiracy theories don’t often appear here. Don’t make the mistake of assuming I can’t take criticism however, because I love a good debate based on science. I’ve long …
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.