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You are browsing the archive for August 2015 - Page 2 of 2 - Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal.

14 August 2015

The Ugly Side of August Arrives in The Northeast Next Week

Unlike much of the Plains and the Deep South, the summer has not been that hot across the mid-Atlantic and Northeast U.S. but next week is going to bring the ugly side of August to much of the region. The heat will likely make it all the way into Toronto and Montreal and affect millions of people. This same weather pattern a month ago would likely bring highs in the …

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13 August 2015

Tianjin Explosion Seen By Himawari and Other Weather Satellites

The folks over at CIMMS posted a cool animated GIF of the explosion in China as seen by the geostationary weather satellites. The new Himawari can scan very rapidly and has the highest resolution of any stationary weather satellite. You can even see the smoke debris cloud move away from the explosion. The black pixels are showing extreme heat in this thermal IR image. CIMMS has views from other wavelengths …

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11 August 2015

The Real Reason U.S. Weather Models Missed The Forecast on Hurricane Sandy

Among my fellow meteorologists, the talk after Hurricane Sandy was how accurate the european ECMWF model was compared to the U.S. Global Forecast System (GFS) model. Fortunately, most of us who were forecasting Sandy, knew that the euro was the better choice from previous experience, but it turns out that the reason we thought it did a better job was wrong. We thought it was because the Euro models initialization of the atmosphere …

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10 August 2015

Bad Science Is Always Fair Game

When Daily Show host John Stewart said goodbye last week he gave his fans some advice that I thought was excellent- If you see B.S., then say something. So, with that in mind, this is fair notice that while I steer away from policy, if a politician says something about science that is clearly wrong, then they deserve to be called on it. I did that with Mike Huckabee a …

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9 August 2015

National Geographic Adjusts Arctic Maps To Account For Ice Loss

  The National Geographic Society has put out a press release about their recently updated Arctic maps, with a more realistic depiction of the muli-year ice pack. The animated gif above shows the dramatic and unprecedented change underway at the top of the world. Interestingly the Antarctic is different because instead of ocean you have land with thousands of feet of ice on top. As that land ice melts, it …

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Why I Hope They Label GMO Foods

Just saw a story on the BBC that Scotland has banned GMO crops. I wonder if they know that every crop growing there now has been genetically modified by humans and nature countless times? The folks that passed the ban have been genetically modified as well! I actually hope that they do make labelling of GMO foods mandatory. Actually, I don’t see why they shouldn’t proudly display it on the …

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7 August 2015

Am I The Only One Who Noticed..

Knowing that NASA,NOAA, and EVERY major scientific society on Earth says that we must immediately reduce our emissions of Carbon, or risk dangerously changing the planet’s life support system, you’d expect that at least one question in the debate Thursday night would be about that subject. You’d be wrong. Now, I could understand skipping something real difficult, like is the Earth over a million years old?, or are the fossils …

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5 August 2015

EPIC Image of the Earth and Moon

In case you have not seen it… this has to be one of the most epic images of the Earth and Moon ever. It almost looks photo-shopped but it’s not. From the Deep Space Climate Observatory at the Lagrange 1 point a million miles from Earth. Below is an animated image:

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2 August 2015

New Paper Shows Global Climate Model Errors are Significantly Less Than Thought

Imagine I look at a numerical weather model forecast that predicts the temp. at 5 PM the next day, will be 30C where I live. The next day, I go out at 5 PM and measure 29C instead. Was the model wrong? Probably, since models are just numerical representations of the atmosphere with some processes explicitly predicted, while other processes (like clouds) approximated from other model variables. There is also …

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