You are browsing the archive for January 2015 - Page 2 of 2 - Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal.
14 January 2015
Weather Forecasts Are About To Get Even Better
I asked one of my professors at OU in the mid 1970’s if we would ever be able to make reliable forecasts out to a week, and he said it was unlikely, because we would needs computers running hundreds of times faster than they did then. Well, what do you know! The computer in your iPhone is thousands of times faster than what was in the Lunar Module on July …
13 January 2015
Hanging With Smart People at AGU
The AGU meeting every December in San Francisco is truly an amazing experience, and while I only was able to be there for two days, it was well worth flying across the entire continent and back in 48 hours. Here are some sights and sounds from the AGU that I and others made. Up first is meeting Geoph Haines-Stiles one of the senior producers of the original COSMOS with Carl …
12 January 2015
Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Vaccine Against Pseudosciece
What does alternative math have in common with alternative physics, and alternative medicine? None of them work! This is a sample of an excellent edition of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Star Talk podcast about pseudoscience. It’s this kind of plain reasoning that make Neil Tyson the hero of college educated millennials, and science lovers everywhere. In the episode, the wiki list of cognitive biases is mentioned, and you can read it here. …
9 January 2015
City Lights, On A Cold and Snowy Night
The Suomi satellite has the ability to get images of the Earth at night, and this week it grabbed one of the prettiest shots yet, under the light of a full Moon. With clear skies and snow on the ground, you can see the snow and if you look closely you can see some high clouds on top of the lights across portions of Iowa and Minnesota. You can get a much …
8 January 2015
It’s Colder Than Mars Outside- No Really!
Data from the weather station on-board the Curiosity Rover at Gale Crater showed a rather mild afternoon on Mars. Warmer than the area in blue over the NE U.S.!
7 January 2015
Wind Chill Is NOT How Cold It Feels, But Bundle Up Anyway!
With wind chills almost certainly reaching -30 or lower across the Eastern U.S. tonight, I thought you might be interested in some information about what it does and does not measure. First of all, water will not freeze at 33 degrees, no matter how hard the wind blows, and the wind chill is NOT “how cold it feels”. What it does measure is the rate of heat loss due to …
6 January 2015
Major Advance For Weather Prediction In The U.S.
This is a guest Post from University of Washington Professor of Atmospheric Sciences Cliff Mass. It is a re-post from his popular blog here. This is important. Today, NOAA’s administrator Kathryn Sullivan announced that the National Weather Service will acquire two very powerful CRAY supercomputers to support U.S. numerical weather prediction. A machine that will FINALLY allow the U.S. to do world-class forecasting. (The press release is here). In a number …
4 January 2015
The Dogs of Winter Are Getting Ready To Howl!
The coldest air of the winter is about to head into the Midwest and NE U.S. over the next few days. A 1058 millibar high pressure is going to drop into the Plains starting Monday and by Thursday morning, temperatures will fall below zero as far south as Southern Indiana and Pennsylvania. The images below are from a new experimental model run that NOAA is working on to improve their …
1 January 2015
This Green and Snowy Sceptered Isle
The UK had a pretty good snow event last week after Christmas, and NASA released this true colour image from the MODIS sensor on the Aqua satellite. Click for the full 5 megabyte high resolution version. You folks in the UK could get a nice poster out of that pic! If you look at the snow over Northern Wales, you will see Anglesey jutting out to the west. The image …
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.