You are browsing the archive for January 2018 - Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal.
26 January 2018
Countless Numbers of Americans are Treating the Flu with Sugar Pills.
The flu bug is bad this year, but it seems that countless thousands of Americans are treating it with sugar pills. The product below is being sold by big brand pharmacies and there is nothing in it but sugar. When I saw this infographic from the Questionist.com I laughed. It’s diluted to 10-400 ! Just to give you an idea of how small that is, there are only 1078 atoms in the …
21 January 2018
Visitors to Our National Parks Deserve the Unvarnished Truth about History and Science
Note: The following is a guest post by Brian Ettling. It’s from his own blog, and I’m indebted to him for allowing me to share it here. I met Brian briefly at the AGU Science meeting in San Francisco a few years ago, and what he has to say is important. “A man or woman could hardly ask for a better way to make a living than as a seasonal …
18 January 2018
2017 Was Another Year of Amazing Heat. It’s not Natural, and It IS the Greenhouse Gases
NASA and NOAA both announced their global temperature results for 2017 today. NASA says it was the second warmest year on record and NOAA which does the analysis slightly differently came up with the 3rd hottest. Interestingly, if you remove the impacts of El Nino and La Nina, 2017 was THE hottest on record (see below). Forest Vs. Trees There are only three things that affect Earth’s temperature: Incoming radiation …
17 January 2018
GOES-16 Lightning Detector Spots Michigan Meteor
My friend and superb meteorologist Paul Gross at WDIV has just posted some new info on the meteor last night in lower Michigan. It was loud, it rocked seismograms and it was even seen by an instrument on the GOES-16 weather satellite! Paul has a piece just posted with some cool info about this. My first thought last night was if the Geostationary Lightning Mapper on the GOES-16 might have spotted it, …
15 January 2018
What Science Really Knows About The Asteroid That Took Out T-Rex and his Friends.
NOTE: I had the wrong video posted. Fixed now. Every time I watch a TV show about a science field other than atmospheric science I have to remind myself that I’m being given a very simplified version. Sometimes too simplified, and I know it because when I watch a show on atmospheric science, I often cringe. This is true even on programs like NOVA because you can read the script for …
13 January 2018
It’s a New World; You Can Attend A Great Science Conference from Home
I’m just back from the AMS Annual Meeting, and like the much larger AGU meeting, it’s impossible to make every talk. That’s ok because it’s 2018 and (thanks to scientific discoveries) you just go online and watch what you missed! I did not make the AGU in New Orleans this year, but many of those talks are now online, and I plan on sharing some of my favorites here over the next …
11 January 2018
Dr. Richard Alley’s Amazing Talk at the Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society is a Must Watch
I’ve been at the AMS Annual Meeting all week and as always it was an adventure in learning in so many ways. My highlight was seeing two good friends become Fellows of the Society. Those in the Detroit area are lucky to have Paul Gross (at WDIV) and those in Columbia are lucky to have Jim Gandy (at WLTX). They are two of the finest broadcast meteorologists in the country. …
5 January 2018
Thoughts and Images of The Great Blizzard of 2018
Working on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, you might imagine I have been rather busy over the last few days and that is beyond an understatement. I was brought to work today in a four-wheel drive jeep and I have 11″ of snow on my sidewalk! This was a memorable storm and perhaps what makes it more so is how fast the pressure in the storm dropped. The pressure in the …
1 January 2018
Stopping by The Woods on A Snowy Morning.
Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year. He gives his harness bells a shake To ask if there is some …
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.