You are browsing the archive for July 2018 - Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal.
30 July 2018
A Guest Post on Another Blog That You Should Read.
Jason Furtado, a meteorologist (at my alma mater) the Uni. of Oklahoma, has a guest post on the Climate.Gov blog about the likely El Nino this winter. Every El Nino is different, but El Nino’s centered in the Pacific can have much different weather patterns across the U.S. compared to an East Pacific El Nino. Dr. Furtado explains why he thinks this one may be centered in the Pacific (good …
28 July 2018
The Science Video Facebook Did Not Want You To See
One of the best science communicators I know is Dr Katharine Hayhoe who is a climate scientist at Texas Tech. There are some great videos on youtube of her talks, and she has done some great talks on PBS Digital under the banner Global Weirding. When they tried to post one of those videos to Facebook they got a real surprise. They decided to boost the post to reach more …
26 July 2018
A Simple Tweet That Tells a Vivid Story
Simon Lee posted a tweet Sunday night that got a lot of attention. He’s a meteorologist who will soon begin working toward his PhD at the Univ. of Reading in England, and here’s the story: It was a hot June in the UK, and many are comparing it to the memorable heatwave of 1976. Using freely available data from NASA, Simon put together two maps that show how different the …
20 July 2018
A Space and History Lesson on the 49th Anniversary of the Moon Landing
It was 49 years ago today that Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, and while I remember it vividly, I often think about those who were born after that event. Can they truly imagine the wonder of it? If you’re under 50, you grew up in a world where people walking on the Moon was a part of our history and I know you appreciate the event, but likely not …
13 July 2018
What’s New in Climate Science? Here’s a Good Summary
Dr. Katharine Hayhoe at Texas Tech is one smart scientist, and she’s also an incredibly good science communicator. I know a lot of people who are one or the other, but vey few who are both. Any meteorologist who works in broadcast meteorology can appreciate how difficult achieving both these skills can be, so when she says something, I share it widely. Believe me, I get how difficult it is …
10 July 2018
Think Humans Can’t Control the Earth’s Weather?? Don’t be Silly.
The new GOES-16 satellite produces stunning images every day of weather phenomena, but this is something that surprised me! The NWS at Grand Forks in North Dakota posted the image below on Twitter today. Note the yellow speckles in the upper part of the image. That’s Canola. The bright yellow is visible from space using the true color GOES-16 images. With the increased reflectivity (albedo) of the ground, I wondered how …
8 July 2018
Seems The Sun Has Melted Southern California
Well, apologies to Albert Hammond (Google it young people) but I’ve been searching for words to describe the heat event in Southern California yesterday. Fritz Coleman, KNBC’s meteorologist called it astonishing, and I used astounding. Trust me, words fail to describe the magnitude of this heat event. Van Nuys set an all-time record high of 117ºF which broke their daily record by 18 degrees!! So did Burbank and UCLA (NWA …
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.