You are browsing the archive for January 2014 - Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal.
31 January 2014
The Great Facebook Blizzard- Storms and Rumors of Storms
It apparently got started with two images. One from the Facebook page of “Weatherboy weather” and another that got published in an online newspaper article in Russellville, Arkansas. It was also posted on AL.COM (the online portal of several major Alabama newspapers). The result was a crush of emails and messages to meteorologists at TV stations and NWS offices across the eastern U.S.! The actual origination may be different on …
30 January 2014
The Governor of Georgia Is Entitled To His Own Opinion, But Not His Own Facts
There is a firestorm brewing tonight over remarks by Georgia Governor Nathan Deal who blamed the National Weather Service forecast for the mess on Georgia roads last night, when thousands were stranded in their cars on icy freeways. To quote Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Governor “is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” While no forecast is ever perfect, the NWS did NOT miss the forecast. For …
27 January 2014
No Event Horizon Around Black Holes??
I suspect this will have a lot of astrophysicists talking. Stephen Hawking has published a paper (yet to be peer reviewed) that tries to solve a well known paradox about black holes. It’s in Nature News. Click the image to read (Nice thing for high school science teachers to talk with students about as well). All of these paradoxes seem to come about because physics has yet to find a …
25 January 2014
Well Made Point by XKCD
How to spot someone whose critical thinking skills are in need of improvement. XKCD.com has a classic today: A New survey conducted by George Mason University is interesting: Over half of Americans (56%) say “global warming is affecting weather in the United States.” A large majority of Americans say their state and local government should make it a priority to protect public water supplies (78%), transportation/roads/bridges (73%), people’s health (72%), the …
23 January 2014
2013 4th Warmest Year On Global Record
NOAA calculated that 2013 was the 4th warmest year on record globally, and NASA using a slightly different method ranked it 7th. In both cases, the ten warmest years on record have all been since 1998. With the bitter cold in the Eastern U.S. today, this is a perfect time to illustrate the difference between climate and weather. Climate change doesn’t mean it never gets cold and snowy. It does …
18 January 2014
The Challenges of Climate Change Communication
This is a re-post from the Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media. It’s a subject that meteorologists who work in TV deal with every day. Even if communicating climate is not part of your job, you’ll still learn some real science about climate. If your job is in any way connected to communicating science, this is a must see/read. Richard Alley, Susi Moser Featured in Yale Forum Communications …
17 January 2014
Premiering Next Week- Revenge of The Polar Vortex (Starring the Dogs of Winter)
It’s coming back. Will it be as cold as the last one at the beginning of the year? Too soon to say but there are growing signs it will last longer and may come in several waves. Numerical weather ensembles (See last two blog posts) are in remarkable agreement that the cold will return. Model guidance is indicating temperatures as much as 40 degrees below normal by later next week! …
14 January 2014
The Polar Vortex Gets Its 15 Minutes of Fame
I was asked by the AGU to do a post about the Polar Vortex for the AGU Blog THE BRIDGE. You can read it by clicking on the image below: and then you should read Bob Henson’s piece from the NCAR AtmosNews Journal
13 January 2014
Don’t Let The Thaw Fool You, The Revenge of The Polar Vortex May be Coming
Numerical weather models tend to become very unreliable beyond 5 or 6 days but meteorologists have discovered a trick that helps in long-range forecasting. At least a bit. We still cannot pin down what day a storm will hit at a particular place but we can get a good idea of whether or not the pattern will be warm/cold/dry or stormy. Here is the trick: Run the weather model multiple …
7 January 2014
No, Just Because It’s Really Cold In The Eastern U.S., All That Science Is Not Wrong
What does claiming this blast of Arctic air disproves climate change show? The same thing that claiming researchers who got trapped in an ice flow in Antarctica does: that your critical thinking skills are in need of serious improvement! My normal response to questions about it is that we do not measure the temperature of the planet in (insert your town here). One can also point out that this past …
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.