You are browsing the archive for June 2016 - Page 2 of 2 - Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal.
8 June 2016
It’s World Oceans Day, but There is Little To Celebrate
Today is World Oceans Day, and the news about their health is downright alarming. Besides pollution from chemicals and tons of plastic, they are presently the warmest that man has ever measured, and they are getting more acidic due to the increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. The warmth of the water has decimated Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, a UNESCO World Heritage site, and don’t forget the Arctic ocean …
7 June 2016
India Heat Reaches Dangerous Levels
They are anxiously awaiting the monsoon in India. It will bring flooding rains, but at least it will cool the temperatures back to near 33°C, instead of the 47°C they saw in some spots today! That is over 118° on the old Fahrenheit scale, but that’s only part of the story: The dew-point reached 25-27°C, and that is heat and humidity that almost no part of America has ever seen. …
6 June 2016
Why Hurricane Season Forecasts are Very Tricky
I’m not a fan of long-range forecasts for the hurricane season. We need to attempt them, because that’s how science advances, we test hypothesis, and reject the ones that fail in an experiment. That said, I am not sure these forecasts are worthy of public dissemination, unless they come with a strong warning that the skill is low. You may know that El Nino reduces the number of hurricanes and …
3 June 2016
Texas Flooding From Space
Click on the image below to go to a special NASA satellite image that you can drag across to see the flooding along the Brazos River in Texas. There is some good news here, because the flooding will taper off by late Sunday, and a hotter drier weather pattern will arrive in this area next week.
New Climate Spiral From Ed Hawkins
A big hat tip to the folks at Climate Central for alerting me to this. You likely saw the climate spiral courtesy of Ed Hawkins who is a climate scientist at the Univ. of Reading (UK). It melted the internet last month. Now he has made a new one showing how it will change for the rest of the century based on the latest most sophisticated models (which have done …
1 June 2016
Brian Greene and the Galilean Cannon
You might guess that I’m a bit geeky, but I long ago made peace with myself over being a nerd, and I am a big believer that the only thing new in the world is the history or science you do not know. I honestly have no idea what Game of Thrones is about (other than my wife’s insistence that “You won’t like it, trust me”), and if it’s not …
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.