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You are browsing the archive for October 2014 - Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal.

30 October 2014

Five Things To Know About 2014 Global Temperatures

Deke Arndt at NOAA’s Climate.gov has a good Q&A that is worth sharing. Reproduced below: Five things to know about 2014 global temperatures Author: Deke Arndt Friday, October 24, 2014 Deke Arndt is Chief of the Climate Monitoring Branch at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, in Asheville, North Carolina. He is a frequent advisor to Climate.gov, and he’s as good at explaining climate in front of the camera as he is at …

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29 October 2014

Doppler Radar Sees Debris from Antares Explosion

The NWS Doppler radar at Wakefield,Va detected the debris from the Antares explosion Tuesday evening. Not only that, but it was able to show that this was not rain but debris in the air. Being a dual polarimetric radar it can detect the shape of the particles in the radar beam, and a product called the correlation coefficient showed that the echo was made up of particles that were of …

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Antares Explodes At Wallops. Explosion Heard/Seen for 50 Miles.

Here is how the explosion looked as WBOC covered the Antares launch and explosion live. This was likely one of the largest rocket explosions ever at Wallops. The reason is that it happened with a fully fueled vehicle, carrying 5,000 pounds into orbit. Most other failures at Wallops were either non-orbital launches, or carrying much lighter payloads. The blast lit up the clouds and was seen across almost all of …

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28 October 2014

Sound Science Battles Hysteria- Sagan Got It Right

Some politicians (Mainly the governors of NY and NJ) are taking it on the chin this Monday night for locking up a nurse returning from West Africa who was helping patients with Ebola. The treatment of Kaci Hickox has been called a hysterical over-reaction by several of this country’s top health experts, and fortunately they seem to be backing down.  When they locked up a healthy nurse who was helping …

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24 October 2014

Circumzenithal Arc over Maryland

The halo near the sun is at 22 degrees, and the bright spot to the left is a sundog (or more technically a Parahelia). Now, Look at the top of the pic, and you see something rather more rare: a CIRCUMZENITHAL ARC. I took the picture (with my newly arrived iPhone 6) just before 5 PM EDT (21 GMT) this Friday evening here in Salisbury,Maryland. The image below from Les …

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23 October 2014

Forecasters and Science Writers Knock Weather.Com For Hype

A low-end nor’easter is bringing wind and rain to much of the Northeast U.S. this evening, and Gale Warnings have been posted in the Atlantic as well. As nor’easters go, this is not really a big one, and we will see far worse over the coming months, with some of them bringing snow instead of rain.This is what I told my viewers here in Maryland/ Delaware, and so did many …

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20 October 2014

Record Warm September Increases Odds that 2014 Will be Hottest on Record

From NOAA. From NOAA. NOAA announced today that both August and September were the hottest globally since reliable instrument records began in the 1880’s. From NOAA: Global Highlights The combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces for September 2014 was the highest on record for September, at 0.72°C (1.30°F) above the 20th century average of 15.0°C (59.0°F). The global land surface temperature was 0.89°C (1.60°F) above the 20th …

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19 October 2014

New Brian Cox Series Human Universe on BBC Two is Excellent. Will it air in America?

I was in the UK on holiday last week, and caught two episodes of Professor Brian Cox’s new series Human Universe on BBC Two. Once again, Cox was superb, and the BBC have shown that no one on the planet can match them in science programming. Hopefully BBC will air it on BBC America or perhaps they will sell it to PBS. Then again there are probably tons of illegal …

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17 October 2014

Another Well Written Defense of Science

Jonathan Bines is a staff writer for Jimmy Kimmel and he has a piece in Huff Post that is superb- it deserves sharing and widely. In this memorable October, a lot of virologists (and disease experts) are getting a taste of what evolutionary biologists, and climate scientists have experienced. A quote from Bines: “Science cannot be refuted by appeals to intuition or personal experience, attacks on the character or motivations …

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16 October 2014

The Winter Forecast Is Out, and It’s Probably Wrong!

  NOAA Released the 2014/2015 winter forecast today and it is probably wrong. I’m not taking a slam at NOAA here, they will also admit to you that the odds are that this forecast will not be correct. The truth is, that any forecast beyond 5-7 days has very low skill. That said, we cannot learn to make long-range forecasts unless we try, and that’s how science works: we make …

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