You are browsing the archive for June 2015 - Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal.
29 June 2015
The Great Derecho Was Three Years Ago Today
Three years ago tonight I was introducing the viewers of my evening weather broadcast to a new weather term: The Derecho. Here on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, I first mentioned it on air around 5 PM. Through the early evening, I watched it get closer and closer, and by mid evening it was likely that we would be affected. When it arrived at our studios in Salisbury, the …
Smoke From Canada Fires Turns Skies Orange Across the Plains
Raging wildfires in Western Canada have spread smoke over much of the northern/central U.S. this evening. The plume of smoke now extends over 2000 km, and it will likely move into the Eastern U.S. over the next few days, with the summer blue skies turning a milky white. You can see what the smoke looks like from Fargo, ND here. Very dry conditions coupled with recent extreme heat have caused …
28 June 2015
We Are Rapidly Approaching A World Where A Minor Cut Can Be Fatal
We hear so much these days about cancer and Alzheimer’s, but these diseases have been around for most if not all of human history, it’s just they were the minor killers of people who had a long life of 50 or 60 years. The lucky ones got cancer or senility, the rest died from such things as a scratch in the garden, or a bad cold that turned into pneumonia. …
27 June 2015
The Day The Mesozoic Died- Geoscience Resources for Teachers from the AGU
Just a heads up for teachers here (and that includes home schoolers as well) about some great resources put together by the AGU on different aspects of Earth science. Click the pic above to go to the page which links to all sorts of projects your students are probably interested in. I found the video below there called THE DAY THE MESOZOIC DIED. Watch below! I highly recommend it for everyone. It’s …
24 June 2015
Destroying the Most Persistent Scientific Myth In America
If anyone tells you that the warming we’ve seen over the past century is just a natural swing in Earth’s temperature, they are wrong. Absolutely and totally wrong.This widespread myth is a favorite of some politicians, but It’s been proven WRONG, and there is no scientific doubt about it. I’ve talked about this before and shown graphs etc. but Bloomberg Business did an excellent html web page that shows just …
22 June 2015
Severe Geomagnetic Storm Underway
Update 7:25 PM US EDT: Scott Kelly on the ISS is seeing what he calls the best display he has ever seen from orbit of the aurora: The Kp index is currently at 8 and if that holds, we could see the Northern Lights over the northern half of the U.S. tonight. Europe should be seeing them now, but because we are at the solstice the light lingers at high …
20 June 2015
The Ghost of Bill Heads for The East Coast
It’s a summer weekend here in the Mid-Atlantic, and that means thousands are on the beaches from Fire Island To Ocean City in Maryland, while at the same time, the Firefly music festival just north of Dover in Delaware has drawn a crowd of 95,000 people to see such acts as Paul McCartney (I typed that name standing up of course) and Snoop Dog. Now, add in the remains of …
19 June 2015
Senate Wants to Take NWS Back To The Future
A proposal in the U.S. Senate to realign the National Weather Service, with all forecasts coming from 6 regional centers got plenty of attention this week, and most of the reaction was rather negative. First a little NWS history lesson:In the 1950- 1980’s the NWS had two types of offices, NWSFO and NWS Offices. The NWSFO’s were the forecast offices and usually the smaller offices were mainly responsible for local …
16 June 2015
Don’t Miss This June Sky Show
Kelly Beatty is my “go to guy” for astronomy questions, and he’s been kind enough to come to the AMS Conference on Broadcast Meteorology for years ( he was an invited talk again this year by the AMS Committee on Station Science of which I’m chair). Kelly writes for Sky and Telescope, and he has a cool podcast about a real sky show later this month. He told us about …
15 June 2015
Severe Flood Threat for Texas and Oklahoma Rising
Virtually all of the global and regional numerical weather models are showing the potential for very heavy rainfall from what will soon be Tropical Storm Bill in the Gulf. Even if this region had not had historic flooding in May, this would be a big deal, but with the soggy ground, we are now looking at the potential for a very severe and costly flood event. There are some indications …