You are browsing the archive for May 2016 - Page 2 of 2 - Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal.
12 May 2016
La Nina Watch for Fall 2016
NOAA has issued a La Nina Watch for the fall, and there are growing signs that the super El Nino of last winter will become a La Nina event for our next one. It is too early to say how strong a La Nina will develop, but the odds are around 3 out of 4 that we will see a La Nina winter. La Nina events tend to bring cooler …
11 May 2016
Happy Birthday Richard Feynman
Richard Feynman would be 98 today, so here are some of my favorite Feynman quotes: The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool. For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled. “Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it …
10 May 2016
How to Survive A Tornado
I have said it to countless people over the last 36 years: Put as many walls between you and the outside as possible if a tornado is approaching, and if there is a bathroom in the middle of the house, that’s the place to go. The photo above was taken by one of the storm survey teams from the NWS in Norman,OK today and the young man in the picture …
9 May 2016
Visualizing the Heating of the Planet
An ingenious animated graphic by Ed Hawkins (Climate scientist at the Uni. of Reading in the UK) is going viral online today, and it is well worth sharing. Finding a new way to show raw data in a way that allows you to visualize what is happening, is always worth pursuing. Ed has another graph that shows how 2016 so far compares to last year. Last year was the warmest …
6 May 2016
Smoke from Alberta Wildfire Reaches Florida
The image below is also from the Aqua satellite on Friday and the smoke from the fires is clearly visible. The Suomi Satellite has an imager capable of night time images and the CIMMS Satellite blog at the Uni. of Wisconsin just posted this image from Suomi: Looking at the forecast, it looks like a cool front will bring some rain later Sunday, but amounts will be light, and winds …
5 May 2016
Roaring Inferno in Alberta is What Climate Change Looks Like.
The wildfire in NW Alberta grew much larger overnight and now over 85,000 people are evacuated as fire crews try to save the city. The question about how this is related to climate change is an easy one, a very easy one. It is related, and the data backs it up. Jeff Masters (at Weather Underground) has an exc. post on this, and he posted a graph from Rutgers (see …
4 May 2016
Chesapeake Bay Grasses Making a Comeback
My colleague Ty Butler did an excellent piece on our air (WBOC TV Eastern Shore of Maryland/Delaware) tonight about the recovery of the Chesapeake Bay grasses. This is really good news, and a sign that the health of the Bay is indeed improving. Ty has some great underwater photography in his piece, and it’s an exc. example of really good environmental science reporting. Call me impressed. Click the image below …
3 May 2016
Kudos to Jimmy Kimmel For Supporting Reason over Myth
Warning for semi-strong language, but well worth watching. An education teaches you how much you do not know. Unfortunately, Mrs. Palin does not seem to have a clue about that. Read this to understand how much heat energy the CO2 is trapping.
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.