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8 September 2016
OSIRIS Launches Toward Asteroid. It Will Bring Back a Piece of it!
I did a satellite interview with NASA Scientist Lucy McFadden Thursday about the launch of the OSIRIS probe. If all goes well, it will do something never done before, and bring back a few pieces of an asteroid orbiting the sun. You can see the interview below:
20 August 2016
Here Is How We Get More Women In Science
I ran across what I think is an important paper in PLOS One this week, and it involves women and STEM careers. Go to any science conference, and you see far fewer women than men, and this paper may have hit on why this is the case. In general, women do not seem to have the confidence that they can get through calculus, and make no mistake about it, it’s …
5 August 2016
Three Great Popular Science Books (and a bonus 4th)
I have not made any book recommendations lately, so it is high time I do. First for my fellow atmospheric science geeks (and those who have a math/physics background), the Tropical Meteorology textbook that was produced by Met-Ed (COMET) is excellent (you will need to register, but it’s free) and I have been enjoying it. I finally have my head around equatorial Kelvin waves! Even high school students (who have …
28 June 2016
Using Satellite Data to Forecast Flooding
A lot of folks have a vague idea of how valuable satellite data is for forecasting severe weather. With the launch of GOES R this fall, the data will be nearly real-time, like radar is now, and it will revolutionize forecasting. That said, we already have satellite products that (using the different IR and visible channels) can detect and track water vapor in the atmosphere. I chair the NWA Committee …
3 June 2016
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 …
22 May 2016
Where The Fault Lies
Rural students in America who want a good education have a steep mountain to climb. Rural areas are generally poor, conservative, and tend toward fundamental religious beliefs, and this is turning out to be a real issue when it comes to teaching science. If you don’t believe me, ask a Biology teacher in rural Alabama, or almost anywhere in Texas. Too often, it’s not just angry parents they have to …
22 April 2016
You Can Thank These Three People for Earth Day
I remember very well watching the CBS Evening News (46 years ago today) on the first Earth Day. It was a major story, and I believe Walter Cronkite led the broadcast with it. We know a lot more about our planet now than we did then, and there have been some amazing successes in protecting our environment. We now know something that was not well understood then, and that is the …
4 March 2016
Looking Back Toward The Beginning of Time Itself
NASA released a video today that shows the most distant object ever photographed. A galaxy that is 13.4 billion light years away. The Universe was 3% of its present age then and the red shift is an incredible 11.1. This object is now much farther away than 13.4 billion light years, because the Universe is expanding and remember we are seeing this forming galaxy as it looked 13,400 million …
11 February 2016
Einstein’s Gravity Waves Are Real
The American Physical Society has a good write up on the gravity wave discovery announced today here. AP Science writer Seth Borenstein has some background as well. The actual published paper is here: http://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102 More on how LIGO works here:
11 December 2015
The Candle of Knowledge Flickers This Dark December
The Japanese have launched a spacecraft called Hyabusa 2 to look at an asteroid, and as it passed Earth this week (to get a speed boost), it grabbed this shot of the Earth and Moon in one frame. Take some time and look at that picture, and consider that the highest we go now is about a millimeter above the Earth in that image. We used to all the way …
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.