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You are browsing the archive for Broadcasting Archives - Page 3 of 4 - Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal.

30 March 2010

Is Brian Cox The Next Carl Sagan?? My Vote is YES.

Dr. Brian Cox. Rock band musician and physicist. No, really. He played in the rock band DARE with Thin Lizzy’s Darren Wharton. If you’re in the UK and have not seen Wonders of The Solar System on BBC Two, then fire up the iPlayer and watch it. All four episodes that have aired are just superb. They are the only TV productions I’ve seen about astronomy that equals or surpasses …

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6 March 2010

The Cold Hard Science Behind "Climate Gate"

I am a proud member of the International Association of Broadcast Meteorologists. Many of us who do weather on TV and radio realise that we may very well be the only person of science the average person sees each day. Those of us in the IABM take that responsibility very seriously. We strive to give accurate information on not only weather but on science in general. Paul Gross of the …

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11 February 2010

Read This Before Asking A Meteorologist What Happened to Climate Change

Trust me on this. Don’t email your local meteorologist and say something like “What do you think of global warming now with all these blizzards?” You will come across rather silly if not down right ignorant. Why? Let’s think about it for a minute. Consider a few things before we jump to the keyboard. My grandmother always said you can’t say something silly if you keep your mouth shut. Something …

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25 November 2009

I'm Heading To The Bottom of The World!

I’ve been keeping a big secret. Way back in August I had a call from a friend  who works at the National Environmental Education Foundation (NEEF) in Washington, DC. She asked if I’d heard that the National Science Foundation was opening up applications for science reporters to visit Antarctica. In case you have never looked into the logistics of going to the South Pole, let me educate you! I have. Oh, have …

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10 November 2009

Things I've Learned Talking To Cameras With Red Lights On Them

When I was a young, dumb undergraduate in Meteorology in the fall of 1977 at the University of Oklahoma, one of the first things I absorbed with great surprise was the inherent dislike of TV weathercasters among many meteorologists and meteorology students. It did not matter whether the TV person had a background in meteorology. (Back then many did not, it’s a bit better now) They still grumbled about how …

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11 October 2009

How To Interpret Weather Radar (A short course with no math!)

A SHORT HISTORY FIRST Weather radar is now a common site on any TV weathercast, and radar images are all over the Internet. It wasn’t really meant to be that way though…. Apparently, the first weather radar image of a dangerous storm shown on TV live was back in 1961. A Houston TV station sent a young reporter to Galveston to cover the approach of Hurricane Carla. It was a mean …

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7 October 2009

What Do Climate Scientists Think About Senator Laughing Stock?

First of all, I write this from my hometown of Tulsa Oklahoma. I’m home because of a sudden illness in my family, and though I have not lived in Oklahoma in 25 years, it will always be home in my mind. That said, the national joke about Oklahoma used to be, and by all rights should still be, the roads. As my great uncle once put it after driving from …

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18 September 2009

21st Century Weather Forecasts On TV

I have been a little sparse in my writing here over the last few weeks, and for good reason. We have been installing a brand new state of the art weather computer system in the WHNT weather office. It’s actually a series of 6 very fast computers all networked together and integrated into the production switcher. It’s an amazing system. I can do things that I could not even image …

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4 July 2009

A Picture Worth a Million Dollars (and it cost about that much too!)

To me the most fascinating part of synoptic forecasting is Satellite Meteorology. I can still remember working in Tulsa at KJRH TV where we had a GOES Unifax machine. Every 15 minutes a high resolution image would spit out. During the day the resolution was 1 km on a visible image. This was good enough to see jet contrails at times. One afternoon a large contrail was visible across Northeast …

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28 June 2009

Please, Anyone! Send a High School Science Book to Congress

The Copenhagen Climate Conference report is now out. In it, the consensus opinion is that we must hold CO2 levels to 400 ppm, IF we are to stay below 2 degrees Celsius of warming. The current CO2 level is 385 ppm and rising at 2 ppm per year. You should read this report. It’s an excellent summary of the current knowledge. Do the math. We may have less than 15 …

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