You are browsing the archive for January 2016 - Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal.
29 January 2016
The Future of Weather Forecasting
With new NOAA computers for numerical weather prediction now online, the focus is to improve the models we have and develop new ones. The new High Resolution Rapid Refresh Model (HRRR-H triple R to meteorologists) is just the beginning of this, and although it only runs out for 15 hours, we get a new run every hour. This is already improving short-term weather forecasts markedly. This model is run on …
25 January 2016
Suomi Sees the Snow
This image form the Suomi Satellite on Sunday afternoon. Snowfall for the storm is below: There is talk today among climate researchers (and synoptic meteorologists like me) about how climate change may be causing these Eastern Seaboard blizzards to be worse, and the very warm waters off the coast with this storm were definitely a factor in this one. See Chris Mooney’s piece in the Washington Post.
24 January 2016
A Storm That Will Be Remembered for Generations
Some are calling it Snowzilla, and having experienced it, the name fits! From DC to Baltimore, and up to New York have over 2 feet. Here on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, it varies but a foot is common in Central and Northern Delaware and near Denton in Maryland. On the coast, major coastal flooding has caused significant damage. I shot the image above (from the WBOC Ocean City Maryland …
22 January 2016
In Case You Saw This in Forbes- It’s laughably wrong.
I suspect that some meteorologists are going to get some questions about a propaganda piece in Forbes stating that 2015 was not the hottest year on record. Trust me it was. NASA, The UK Met Office, and NOAA all do their own calculations and they say it was. Not only that, but their methods have been published in multiple papers, in the top journals of science. Forbes, instead of reporting …
21 January 2016
Historic Storm Aims for the Mid-Atlantic. Why it’s so hard to predict it!
There is little doubt that a major and perhaps historic blizzard will hit DC, Baltimore, and up toward Philadelphia Friday afternoon, lingering into late Saturday night. Winds will be very high along the Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey coasts, with gusts well above 60 mph, and significant coastal flooding. There’s very high confidence in this forecast based on a close agreement among all the numerical weather models, but the details …
18 January 2016
Beware of Fake Snowfall Maps on Social Media
There is a real possibility of a major winter storm this weekend in the I-95 corridor from DC to Boston, and it may impact New Jersey and the Delmarva area as well, with high winds and perhaps some heavy snow. That said, it’s just too far out right now to pin down accumulation amounts. The rain snow line will be right across the area, and experience shows that 5 days …
17 January 2016
Meteo-Tsunami in Naples Area
A rare event seems to have happened in SW Florida this morning, as a strong squall line moved through. It’s called a meteo-tsunami, and it pushed water levels up by over 5 feet! The squall line also produced at least two tornadoes, with one of them causing significant damage to 14 homes near Cape Coral. A real clue that this was indeed a meteo tsunami, is the pressure couplet recorded by the Naples tide buoy. …
No, The Planet Did Not Stop Getting Warmer. Here’s the Proof.
Depending on how you interpret the data, the warming of the air may have slowed somewhat (This is very unlikely though) for a few years in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, but the planet as a whole is still warming steadily. We know this, because the oceans hold almost all the heat, and they are continuing to warm. The graph below is proof, and you might want to study …
14 January 2016
January Tropical Cyclones in The Atlantic & Pacific. At The Same Time!
This hasn’t happened before. Alex is the earliest tropical cyclone on record in the Atlantic. Pali, in the Central Pacific, became the earliest hurricane there this week, only weakening to a tropical storm tonight. What’s going on you ask? Answer: The atmosphere and the oceans are on steroids. The world’s oceans are the warmest ever measured, and the strongest El Nino on record is underway in the Pacific. 2015 was …
11 January 2016
Paying It Forward At The AMS Annual Meeting
I’m in New Orleans to attend the 96th annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society, and today I spent some time talking with students and young professionals about what awaits them as meteorologists. It’s not an easy task, because I suspect the changes they will see in their careers will be even more dramatic than I have witnessed since I graduated from the Univ. of Oklahoma 34 years ago! As …
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.