A Heritage of Traditional Land Surveying

“From the very beginnings of our nation, surveying has been a vital and instrumental tool to promote commerce and land ownership. Before proving himself as our nation’s first military leader, George Washington served the people of Culpeper County, Virginia, as a land surveyor. And when an act of Congress created the Coast Survey in 1807, the first superintendent, Ferdinand Hassler, conducted a land-based survey of the New York City area as the basis for accurate nautical charts of New York harbor.

Traditional methods of land surveying, for both horizontal (latitude and longitude) and vertical (elevation) positioning, require a line-of-sight from one observation to the next. A network of positioning survey marks in coastal areas and across the country developed slowly using this time-consuming method. But over the course of the nation’s history, the network swelled to be large and dense, and indispensable to surveyors across the nation. Over 850,000 survey marks make up this network which is part of the National Spatial Reference System. (Note: The National Spatial Reference System is one of NOAA’s Top Ten Foundation Products.)

A Global Positioning System Revolutionizes Positioning

In the 1970s, the U.S. military began using satellites to position ships and submarines at sea. The promise of satellite-based navigation led the military to develop the Global Positioning System (GPS) of satellites. The first was launched in 1978. By the mid-1990s, the full constellation of 24 navigation satellites, which transmit radio signals from 11,000 miles above the Earth, was complete.

Although initially conceived as primarily a military program, civilian users quickly realized the potential of GPS for everyday positioning and surveying. With GPS receivers today costing less than $100, thousands of private users depend on GPS positioning for automobile, boat, and aircraft navigation; backcountry recreation; and emergency location.

A Parallel GPS Revolution for Even Greater Accuracy

NOAA’s National Geodetic Survey immediately recognized the potential of GPS for uses far more accurate than originally intended. Following the launch of the first GPS satellites, system engineers expected that the positional accuracy for civilian uses would be about 70 m (230 ft). (Military and aviation users would receive a special encrypted signal, enabling them to achieve 10 m (33 ft) accuracy.) While many scientists worldwide lauded a positioning system with 10-meter accuracy, scientists at NGS as early as 1979 were publishing papers on how to use the GPS signals for positioning accuracy down to the centimeter (0.4 in) level!

The National Geodetic Survey led the worldwide research to develop this highly accurate use of GPS, known by the lengthy title of “differential carrier phase positioning.” At first, this capability was limited solely to determining positions of two GPS receivers relative to one another, when both sat stationary for hours. Even this limited application was a revolutionary improvement over traditional surveying. No line-of-sight was required, and distances of hundreds of kilometers could be surveyed in hours, rather than the weeks or months required by traditional survey methods.

Within a few years, National Geodetic Survey scientists began developing “kinematic” methods of processing GPS data. Simply stated, this means that even with one of the GPS receivers moving, positioning accuracies within centimeters were possible. This new survey technique revolutionized land surveying even further, greatly multiplying surveyors’ productivity over traditional methods.

“Kinematic” Methods Revolutionize Aerial Photography

Kinematic GPS surveying also had a profound effect on aerial photography operations. Kinematic survey techniques positioned aerial photographs to within 30 centimeters–significantly better than traditional methods. This eventually meant that for airborne photogrammetric missions, the number of ground control points (large panels or marks that were required to be visible in a photograph to help accurately determine the airplane’s position) was greatly reduced or no longer necessary. Kinematic GPS allowed the location of the airplane to be determined precisely and the hours of pre-flight ground work to establish visible ground control markers by a ground support team were significantly reduced or became unnecessary!

Conclusion

From the beginning, NOAA’s National Geodetic Survey led the way with high-accuracy GPS positioning applications. While GPS itself led its own revolution, the truly innovative scientists of NGS led a parallel revolution to improve the accuracy of GPS for civilian uses. Today, numerous applications for GPS exist which have been spun off of the initial National Geodetic Survey work, and GPS users can (with the right conditions, equipment, and software) determine their position to a centimeter in real-time. NOAA’s contribution to developing precision survey techniques with GPS has had a far-reaching impact on the national civilian survey community.”

“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Those famous lyrics by Bob Dylan may have been about political radicals but they also ring true for those people whose migraines are triggered by changes in the weather. Temperature, wind and barometric pressure (the overall pressure in the atmosphere) are among the environmental factors that can bring on auras, nausea and debilitating head pain.

Recent studies show that as much as 50% of migraines may be weather-related, which means, unfortunately they cannot be managed as well as those brought on by diet, dehydration and fatigue.

Yet there seems to be a wide margin of error in the way people perceive their triggers. One 2004 study in the journal Headache found that 62.3% of people with migraines thought their episodes were weather-sensitive, but an analysis of headache calendars and weather data suggested that only about 50.6% of the study participants actually had migraines that seemed to be clearly associated with weather patterns.

Researchers are still trying to understand more about the weather patterns or factors that may prompt migraines in susceptible individuals. Some of the factors being studied include:

Temperature

Humidity

Changing weather patterns

Barometric pressure

Wind speed

Air ion concentrations (other kinds of particles bound to the oxygen in the air)

The same study previously mentioned also demonstrated that of those participants whose migraine journals revealed weather triggers, nearly 34% were sensitive to absolute temperature and humidity, about 14% were sensitive to changing weather patterns, and nearly 13% were sensitive to barometric pressure.

A Canadian study explored the response of individuals susceptible to migraines during periods of time in which the so-called “Chinook winds” were blowing. This study showed that these warm air winds, which blow into the province of Alberta from the West, increase the frequency of migraines in a subset of people. The study was unable to determine what specific factors actually influenced the onset of headache, because Chinook winds involve a number of weather characteristics.

Still another factor being investigated is called “sferics.” This term refers to pulses of electromagnetic radiation that travel from distant weather and atmospheric situations. Studies that compared information from sferic recording stations with the study participants’ headache diaries have seen some overlap, suggesting that migraine episodes can be triggered by sferic variability.

The association between weather and migraine episodes underscores the importance of keeping a headache diary to help identify and track potential triggers. Such a diary could make note of the prevailing weather patterns on days when you develop a migraine. Over time, you may be able to predict when you’re especially vulnerable. ”

Photo from MargHamp.com

Wikipedia describes rogue waves as follows. “Rogue waves (also known as freak waves, monster waves, killer waves, and extreme waves) are relatively large and spontaneous ocean surface waves that are a threat even to large ships and ocean liners. In oceanography, they are more precisely defined as waves whose height is more than twice the significant wave height (SWH), which is itself defined as the mean of the largest third of waves in a wave record. Therefore rogue waves are not necessarily the biggest waves found at sea; they are, rather, surprisingly large waves for a given sea state. “Rogue waves are not tsunamis, which are set in motion by earthquakes [and] travel at high speed, building up as they approach the shore. Rogue waves seem to occur in deep water or where a number of physical factors such as strong winds and fast currents converge. This may have a focusing effect, which can cause a number of waves to join together.”

We have rare video of rogue waves here or below.

According to The Australian, “two huge waves have dragged dozens of people from a sea wall to a rocky beach hosting the world’s richest big-wave surf contest, leaving some with broken bones.

A total of 13 spectators at Mavericks Surf Contest in California had significant injuries, including broken legs and hands, California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection battalion chief Scott Jalbert said yesterday. At least three were taken to hospital.

Mr Jalbert estimated “a couple (of) hundred” people were on the seawall at the southern tip of Mavericks Beach when the waves struck, upstaging the competition that draws some of the world’s top surfers for a $US150,000 ($169,000) prize.

“Nobody was swept away into the water. They were just swept on to the beach area pretty hard,” he said. “It’s pretty rocky.

“We were very lucky that nobody was swept out to sea.”

The surfing contest is held only when conditions are right. It got the go-ahead when forecasts predicted record-breaking waves, despite warnings that strong winds could make the breakers dangerously unpredictable.

The waves knocked out barricades, a spectator platform and a large scaffold holding speakers broadcasting the contest, held in the harbour town 40km south of San Francisco. “

Using three sophisticated instruments that will collect enormous amounts of data over short time scales, scientists hope to improve their ability to predict the onset of major flares and other phenomena that can disrupt communications, satellite navigation, and power grids.

“SDO will observe the sun almost continuously for more than five years, sending back data at an astounding rate of 1.5 terabytes per day,” said Project Manager Elizabeth Citrin at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “That’s almost 500,000 music downloads per day.

“With this wealth of data, we will learn how solar activity is created and how it will affect space weather. And space weather is what affects us humans here on Earth, our satellites, communications, power grids.”

Madhulika Guhathakurta, lead scientist with NASA’s Living with a Star program, said modern society’s increasing dependence on satellite communications means “that any variability caused by the sun has an impact.”

“Solar variability can affect human spaceflight, satellite operations, smart power grids, GPS navigation, emergency radio communications, air travel, financial services,” she said.

SDO “will observe the sun faster, deeper and in greater detail than any previous observatories,” she said, “breaking barriers of space, time and clarity that have long blocked progress in solar physics.”

Running one day late because of high winds at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, the United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket blasted off at 10:23 a.m. EST.

After a smooth climb out of the atmosphere, the rocket’s Centaur second stage propelled the 8,800-pound solar-powered satellite toward geosynchronous orbit 22,300 miles up.

It will take the spacecraft about three weeks to reach its final parking slot above a ground station in New Mexico, where two 60-foot dish antennas were built to take in the torrent of data from SDO’s instruments–the equivalent of 300 movie downloads per day.

SDO builds on the successes of the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, a joint project between the European Space Agency and NASA, and a fleet of more modest satellites that have revolutionized solar physics in recent years.

But the difference between SDO’s output and previous sun-study satellites is a bit like the difference between a movie and a cartoon flip book.

“SDO is the crown jewel of a fleet of NASA satellites that are designed to study the sun,” said Michael Luther, deputy associate administrator for programs. “SDO is the most advanced spacecraft of its type ever designed and flown. It will give higher quality, more comprehensive, and faster data rate than any spacecraft of its kind before.”

One of its instruments, the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, will snap multi-wavelength full-disk images of the sun every three quarters of a second. It will study on the sun’s corona–the origin of the solar wind, flares, and coronal mass ejections–taking 4096-by-4096 pixel pictures spanning 1.3 solar diameters.

“On the Earth, we have these things called earthquakes,” said Principal Investigator Alan Title. “Earthquakes occur on tectonic plates. That’s where big masses of the Earth move across each other and create shears, and these plates break and release a lot of energy. On the sun, the magnetic fields are the logical equivalent of tectonic plates. And as they move and create shear, they have the potential of releasing huge amounts of energy.”

The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly was built to “develop real physical understanding of what goes on so we can make more sophisticated predictions of what’s happening.”

The Extreme Ultraviolet Variability Experiment will monitor changes in the sun’s ultraviolet output, a critical factor in how the sun heats and energizes Earth’s upper atmosphere. Changes in ultraviolet radiation can cause Earth’s atmosphere to swell slightly, increasing drag on satellites in low-Earth orbit and triggering changes that reduce the accuracy of satellite navigation signals.

SDO’s third instrument, the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager, will measure magnetic fields at the sun’s surface. It also will look into the star’s interior by monitoring low-frequency sound waves, generated by convection, that cause the surface to pulsate, moving up and down several hundred yards every few hours.

By analyzing the vibrations at the surface, researchers can infer details about the sun’s interior.

“The variability of the sun is predominantly caused by magnetic fields,” said Principal Investigator Phil Scherrer. “So if we want to be able to predict that variability, we have to start with predicting the magnetic fields.”

“Here is a timeline of some of the worst natural disasters to batter Haiti:

1770: Strong earthquake devastates Port-au-Prince in then French colony.

1842: Earthquake destroys Cap-Haitien and other cities in northern Haiti and Dominican Republic.

1935: Unnamed storm kills more than 2,000 in Haiti before moving on to Florida as hurricane, where 400 die.

1946: Magnitude-8.1 quake strikes Dominican Republic and Haiti, causing tsunami that kills 1,790 people.

1954: Hurricane Hazel kills hundreds in Haiti.

1963: Hurricane Flora leaves more than 6,000 dead in Haiti and Cuba.

1994: Hurricane Gordon blamed for hundreds of deaths in Haiti.

1998: Hurricane Georges destroys 80 percent of Haiti’s crops while killing more than 400.

May 2004: Three days of heavy rains cause floods that kill more than 2,600.

September 2004: Tropical Storm Jeanne causes flooding and landslides that kill 1,900 and leave 200,000 homeless in Gonaives, Haiti’s third-largest city.

October 2007: Tropical Storm Noel triggers mudslides and floods, killing at least 57 Haitians.

August and September 2008: Three hurricanes and tropical storm kill some 800 in Haiti, devastate crops and cause $1 billion in damage.

Jan. 12, 2010: Magnitude-7.0 quake levels buildings in Port-Au-Prince, raising fears of tens of thousands of deaths. ”

Photo from The Register-Guard.

Kenya’s Daliy Nation

The rains came in November; farmers were happy and sowed, based on the quantitative forecast. But within no time, the rains subsided, throwing the whole nation into a quagmire of confusion.

Politicians saw a window of opportunity to gain some mileage by threatening to collaborate with wheat farmers in suing the weatherman for issuing a false forecast. But while the dust was still in the air, the skies yielded. So huge was the deluge that it swept away a bus, drowned livestock and claimed several lives in the very town where complaints were loudest.

Uncertainty is an uncomfortable aspect of life, but one that pushes humanity to act. To overcome it, man has sought various interventions from soothsayers, astrologers, prophets, magicians and scientists to forecast what the future holds.

Science remains the most credible way of predicting the occurrence of phenomena. It is based on empirical study of phenomena, using laws and principles that have stood the test of time. Meteorology is an example of a scientific discipline, which attempts to explain atmospheric conditions and has found a useful application in forecasting weather.

In developed countries, extreme weather conditions are accurately predicted to the day, hour, and in magnitude. The advance in computer technology and its convergence with the weather satellites have played an immense role in this. But in developing countries, this has remained a big challenge due to a number of problems that are worsened by public ignorance on what weather forecast is and is not.

Our Meteorological Department can attest to this judging by the chronic harsh verdicts from the public despite its dedicated team that gives daily weather forecasts. But why is this so?

FORECASTING SEVERE WEATHER and extreme climatic events is one of the major challenges facing meteorological services worldwide, more so in the tropics. This is worsened by ignorance, technological challenges, complex physical features and lack of appropriate data.

Weather forecasting basically uses atmospheric properties deemed conducive for the occurrence of a given phenomenon using collated data, computer models, satellite images and observations. The predictions only give probability of possibilities of occurrence, intensity and areas likely to be affected.

Like any other scientific method, weather prediction is nowhere near 100 per cent in direction and depth. Unfortunately, weather predictions are normally taken by the public as the gospel truth, and used as the rope to hang the weatherman when these predictions fail. We don’t consider that the predicted conditions are still subject to myriad other factors that are out of control of scientists.

A major objective of forecasting is to unmask fate and inform the current on timely strategic interventions that will mitigate the adverse events of the predicted phenomenon, by informing policies and supporting the end user of such information to adopt accordingly.

When the weatherman announced that El Niño rains were in the offing, the government swung into action with ministries likely to be affected putting in place measures to alleviate its severity.

It is important for all to understand what weather forecast is all about. A forecast that doesn’t translate into light but heat is useless. An accurate forecast that induces no action is worse than an inaccurate forecast with action.”

Photo from Paths To Knowledge (Dot NET).

Geologists have long known that the Mediterranean became isolated from the world’s oceans around 5.6 million years ago, evaporating almost completely in the hundreds of thousands of years that followed.

Scientists also largely agree that the Mediterranean basin was refilled when the movements of Earth’s crustal plates caused the ground around the Gibraltar Strait to subside, allowing the ocean waters of the Atlantic to cut through the rock separating the two basins and refill the sea.

But exactly how the waters cut their way through and how long it took them to do so wasn’t known.

A new study that used seismic data and holes drilled into the rock at the strait revealed that the ocean water cut a 124-mile- (200-kilometer-) long channel across the strait over the course of several thousand years.

The team that conducted the study estimates that the water flowed across slowly at first, over a period of several thousand years. (Though slow in this case is still three times the rate of discharge of the Amazon River today.) But 90 percent of the water likely came over in a rush over the course of several months to two years. Peak rates of water level rise in the basin may have been as high as 33 feet (10 meters) per day, the study authors report.

But rather than rushing over in a giant version of Niagara Falls, the flood likely took the shape of a huge water ramp several miles wide, descending from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, the study, led by Daniel Garcia-Castellanos of the Institut de Ciencies de la Terra Jaume Almera, CSIC in Barcelona, Spain.

The study’s findings are detailed in the Dec. 9 issue of the journal Nature.”

Photo from The Institute for Creation Research.

I began storm chasing May 16, 1999 but had always filmed and watched storms from town. Watching storms from town and actually heading out to chase are two very different things. If one ever wants to see amazing storms you’re going to have to drive a lot and often for nothing. Each year I would increase my chases. I’m now to around 40 chases a year, which is more than enough. In 2005 I had just over 18,000 miles dedicated just to chasing storms. In 2006 it was around 22,000 miles which ranged from TX to ND and CO to IN.

One can become so addicted to something that they lose all ability to view it from an outside angle. It’s hard for me to step back and see how crazy doing this kind of is. I’ve woke up early in the morning and driven to Texas from near Omaha Nebraska, all for nothing, hoping to see cool clouds. To a chaser this does not seem at all crazy. If I try hard I can sort of see how crazy it really might be. The odds are very stacked against you seeing something very crazy, but we go anyway, often affraid of missing something. It can’t be a very healthy hobby if you do it hard year after year. It is a bit depressing being so far from home and seeing crap storms, or nothing at all, then having to start that long drive back, often while extremely tired…and repeating this often.”

Here is a small sample of his work.

More at Extreme Instability.

From Jocelyn Rice, Discover Magazine, 20 things you didn’t know about hurricanes:

1  Our word for these storms comes from Hurakán, a one-legged Mayan deity who summoned the Great Flood from his perch in the windy mists.

2  The Mayans built their major cities inland away from flooding, showing a better understanding of Hurakán’s rages than the engineers who designed the New Orleans waterfront.

3  In 1609 a group of English settlers en route to Virginia were struck by a hurricane and washed ashore at Bermuda—an event that reportedly helped inspire Shakespeare’s Tempest.

4 Hurricanes laid waste to so many powerful armadas that, during the Spanish-American War, President McKinley declared that he feared the storms more than the Spanish navy. In response he established a network of storm-warning stations, the forerunner of today’s National Hurricane Center.

5  During World War II, a British flying instructor, Colonel Joe Duckworth, bet his pilots he could fly straight into a hurricane. Amazingly, he succeeded.

6  Hurricane forecasts today rely on Air Force pilots who zig­zag through the eye, releasing dropsondes—parachute-equipped tubes containing instruments that measure pressure, temperature, humidity, and wind speed.

7  In North America we call them hurricanes, but in the western Pacific the same storms are known as typhoons. To avoid a tedious argument, meteorologists call them all tropical cyclones.

8  Due to the earth’s rotation, hurricanes spin counterclockwise north of the equator and clockwise south of it.

9  And once and for all: No, your flushing toilet does not do the same thing.

10  Most Atlantic hurricanes are born off the western coast of Africa, where warm water and a cool, windy upper atmosphere conspire to create a spiraling storm.

11  Activity peaks this month, when ocean-surface waters are warmest. Nearly half of all tropical cyclones occur in September.

12  We’re going to need a bigger windmill: A typical hurricane releases some 600 trillion watts of heat energy, equivalent to 200 times the world’s total electrical generating capacity.

13  Hurricanes unleash torrential rains, violent thunderstorms, and even tornadoes. But their deadliest component by far is the storm surge, the chunk of ocean pushed ashore by winds that can gust up to 200 miles per hour.

14  In 1970 a 30-foot storm surge claimed at least 300,000 lives in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh).

15  The horrific event inspired the Concert for Bangladesh, the first major rock benefit concert. But most of the proceeds were impounded by the IRS until years later.

16  The largest known tropical cyclone was 1979’s typhoon Tip, which stretched 1,400 miles across the northwestern Pacific—the distance from Dallas to Washington, D.C.

17  That’s still nothing compared with Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a seemingly eternal 400-mile-per-hour hurricane nearly twice the size of our entire planet.

18  The World Meteorological Organization started naming hurricanes in 1953. Now the organization moves through an alphabetical list of names on a six-year rotation, retiring hall-of-famer storm names like “Katrina” each season.

19  Want a storm to call your own? Bad news: The National Hurricane Center already has “a rather large file folder of nominated names.”

20  And be careful what you wish for. After “Cleo” was retired in 1964, a researcher at the center filled the slot with “Camille,” in honor of the daughter of famed hurricane forecaster John Hope. Five years later, hurricane Camille hit the Mississippi coast, killing 250.

National Geographic

“There are few places on Earth where people need not be concerned about flooding. Any place where rain falls is vulnerable, although rain is not the only impetus for flood.

A flood occurs when water overflows or inundates land that’s normally dry. This can happen in a multitude of ways. Most common is when rivers or streams overflow their banks. Excessive rain, a ruptured dam or levee, rapid ice melting in the mountains, or even an unfortunately placed beaver dam can overwhelm a river and send it spreading over the adjacent land, called a floodplain. Coastal flooding occurs when a large storm or tsunami causes the sea to surge inland.

Most floods take hours or even days to develop, giving residents ample time to prepare or evacuate. Others generate quickly and with little warning. These flash floods can be extremely dangerous, instantly turning a babbling brook into a thundering wall of water and sweeping everything in its path downstream.

Disaster experts classify floods according to their likelihood of occurring in a given time period. A hundred-year flood, for example, is an extremely large, destructive event that would theoretically be expected to happen only once every century. But this is a theoretical number. In reality, this classification means there is a one-percent chance that such a flood could happen in any given year. Over recent decades, possibly due to global climate change, hundred-year floods have been occurring worldwide with frightening regularity.

Moving water has awesome destructive power. When a river overflows its banks or the sea drives inland, structures poorly equipped to withstand the water’s strength are no match. Bridges, houses, trees, and cars can be picked up and carried off. The erosive force of moving water can drag dirt from under a building’s foundation, causing it to crack and tumble.

In the United States, where flood mitigation and prediction is advanced, floods do about $6 billion worth of damage and kill about 140 people every year. A 2007 report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that coastal flooding alone does some $3 trillion in damage worldwide. In China’s Yellow River valley, where some of the world’s worst floods have occurred, millions of people have perished in floods during the last century.

When floodwaters recede, affected areas are often blanketed in silt and mud. The water and landscape can be contaminated with hazardous materials, such as sharp debris, pesticides, fuel, and untreated sewage. Potentially dangerous mold blooms can quickly overwhelm water-soaked structures. Residents of flooded areas can be left without power and clean drinking water, leading to outbreaks of deadly waterborne diseases like typhoid, hepatitis A, and cholera.”

More at National Geographic.

“Clouds are an ever-present feature of the earth’s atmosphere. Everyday, around the world, many different types of clouds are seen overhead. We often look at the clouds above us and try to imagine the shapes and figures that they resemble. But clouds tell us much more. They are visible signatures of the motion and conditions of the air in which they exist.

Clouds consist of tiny liquid water droplets or ice crystals or a combination of both. Because these particles are so small, even weak swirls of air movement can keep them suspended indefinitely. It is the multitude of tiny water particles, whether liquid or ice, that interacts with rays of light to make clouds visible.”

More at Environment’s Canada Project Atmosphere Canada.

Photo from StephenBrooks.org .

This is one example of weather and climate. Here is another outstanding video on the subject from National Geographic.

They went back and looked at satellite images in the Indian Ocean as the December 2004 tsunami raced across to destroy coastlines in Thailand, Sri Lanka and elsewhere. They found clear patterns in the water.

“We’ve found that roughness of the surface water provides a good measure of the true strength of the tsunami along its entire leading edge,” Oleg Godin of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement.

“This is the first time that we can see tsunami propagation in this way across the open ocean.”

A giant earthquake in Indonesia triggered the 2004 tsunami, which killed more than 228,000 people.

Governments have since rushed to complete an early warning system of mid-ocean buoys that would detect such waves as they pass by. But such a system is imperfect and might miss areas, especially as the buoys cannot be placed everywhere.

Tsunamis can only usually be seen when they enter shallow water. In the depths of an ocean, the water they displace barely shows — although this tiny movement can also be detected by satellites.”

Full story in News Daily.

Click here  or watch below.

Photo from

Summer solstice explained in simple terms in The Fun Times Guide to Weather.

“We usually think of summer as that time between Memorial Day at the end of May and Labor Day in the beginning of September. Officially, that’s not really the case though.

Meteorological summer runs from June 1st through August 31st — typically the hottest 3-month period of the year. Traditionally, however, we use the astronomical definition of our seasons.

So here’s more about “the first day of summer”… and for that matter, “the first day of winter”. We’ll try to make sense of what’s going on during summer solstice and winter solstice.

The picture (above) represents the first day of summer in the Northern Hemisphere as the sun’s rays are shining straight down on 23.5 degrees North latitude (The Tropic of Cancer).

Notice the North Pole is tilted toward the sun. This is typically the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. …

Where’s The North Pole?
Keep in mind, the Earth isn’t wobbling dramatically such that the North Pole is pointing in opposite directions at different times of the year. While the Earth does wobble a little bit, the North Pole is always pointed in the same direction toward the North Star. Think of it this way: It’s always tilted toward the right.

When it’s on the right side of the sun, the North Pole is pointing away from the sun.

When it’s on the left side of the sun, the North Pole is pointed toward the sun.”

More in  The Fun Times Guide to Weather.

“Formula One drivers and their teams have to be prepared for any weather conditions, and adapt their race plan according to the weather forecast.

Formula One is one of those sports which relies a lot on the preparation and technical skill of the car, driver, and his support team. Decisions about what features to include on a car in a particular race can make a big difference to the end positions and how successful a team is.
The race will go ahead regardless of the weather conditions and drivers and their teams have to be prepared to plan ahead and adapt their race plan accordingly.

Varying conditions
The Formula One season sees races take place all over the World on a range of circuits – from Silverstone in Britain to Montreal in Canada, Kuala Lumpar in Malaysia, and Suzuka in Japan.
One race could be in scorching conditions and the next could be cold and wet and the teams have to be able to adapt, both for the warm-up on day one of the event, and even more importantly on race day itself.

Tyres
For the support teams it can be a bit of a guessing game before the race to decide which kind of tyres to put on the cars. If there’s rain around, wet tyres, which have grooves in them (similar to normal car tyres), are probably the best because they allow water to run off them.
Choosing the correct tyres to suit the weather conditions
They help avoid the risk of the car aquaplaning. These are different to dry tyres, which have four shallow grooves in them allowing for more contact with the tarmac and therefore enabling the car to go faster.

In dryer conditions, the race will be run a lot faster and more overtaking will be possible (depending on the circuit, of course). Choosing the wrong tyres can make a big difference on the race positions. For example, this season’s Grand Prix at Spa in Belgium saw really wet conditions at the start of the race, as the track dried up teams started to switch from wet to dry tyres. Race positions changed dramatically according to which lap the teams decided to enter the pit though. Driving just one extra lap on a dry surface with wet tyres, saw several cars fall behind.

Other problems associated with the wet
During the race, the wet weather is likely to have the biggest effect. If there’s water on the track it effects how the drivers race. As well as considering what tyres to use, the wet means the drivers have to use a lot more skill to handle the increasing demands the water can put on them.

In wetter weather, the speed the drivers go at will be reduced. It will, therefore have an effect on where they overtake and the distance they can make between themselves and the driver behind.

Wet weather on the track also means visibility will be dramatically reduced. Spray coming off the car in front will affect how far drivers can see. Not only will it have an impact on how well they can see the driver ahead, it will also reduce their ability to see the drivers behind, and this could be a disadvantage if they’re not expecting someone to be as close as they are. ”

More on the BBC.

Photo from autoblog.

Its mission: “We are an international organisation supported by 31 States. We provide operational medium- and extended-range forecasts and a state-of-the-art super-computing facility for scientific research. We pursue scientific and technical collaboration with satellite agencies and with the European Commission.”

ECMWF has re-examined the weather conditions on D-day in a strictly scientific manner.

“Weather forecasts critical to the success of the D-Day landings of 6 June 1944 were made on the nights of 3/4 and 4/5 June 1944:
- forecasts for conditions on 5 June made on the evening of 3 June and confirmed early in morning of 4 June;
- forecasts for conditions on 6 June made on the evening of 4 June and confirmed early in the morning of 5 June.

The first of these two forecasts, presented to General Eisenhower by his meteorological advisor, Group Captain J.M. Stagg, led to the postponement of the invasion planned for 5 June; the second enabled Eisenhower to make the decision to go ahead on the following day.

One of the forecasters involved, Lawrence Hogben, writing in the Royal Meteorological Society’s magazine Weather in June 1994 recalled how three separate teams, from the Met Office, the Royal Navy and the US Air Force, first made separate forecasts and then sought consensus – an early example of what today we refer to as ensemble forecasting. On the evening of 3 June the teams initially split two-to-one in favour of conditions leading to postponement; the following evening it was initially a two-to-one split in favour of conditions that would allow the invasion to proceed. Demanding military requirements, stormy weather in the Atlantic and associated fronts moving up the English Channel combined to make forecasting far from easy, and decisions were finely balanced.

Today, the science and technology of weather forecasting is far removed from that of sixty years ago. Forecasting beyond a few hours ahead nowadays relies on automated procedures for processing digitized observations to give a snapshot of the state of the atmosphere. This is used to initiate a computerised model of the atmosphere that projects the information forward in time to form the forecast. The initial snapshot, known as the “analysis”, itself depends on the atmospheric model; it is constructed by blending the latest observations with a “background” forecast initiated from the analysis made a few hours earlier. As time goes by, this process of “data assimilation” produces a picture of how the weather has evolved, built up by the succession of analyses.”

Full details on the re-analysis and forecast on D-day at ECMWF.

Photo from  America’s Library.

The basic forces of nature which drives the weather patterns are very well explained, as is customary with National Geographic.

Watch the video here or below.

Photo from Digital Photo Gallery Of Ted Szukalski.

Alan Sealls, Chief Meteorologist at WKRG News for Mobile-Pensacola, last year prepared an excellent video on hurricanes. Alan talks about about the formation of hurricanes, how their track is measured and forecast, …

Photo from Weatherman911.

Watch the video here.

On Monday, Environmental Graffiti “decided to turn [its] gaze on two more benign but no less majestic powers of earth and sky. Clouds and mountains can also seem to confront each other in dramatic fashion – like armies lined up to do battle – and what spectacle when they do….

…Finally, the science bit. Clouds are of course formed by condensation as water vapour forms into tiny droplets or ice crystals just a fraction of a millimetre wide. Small they may be, but when these crystals get together, crowding around one another in their billions, they become visible as clouds. Clouds appear white because they are able to reflect light; this halo-like lenticular cloud – a stationary cloud that forms at high altitudes – is a case in point.”  Illustrated in the photo above.

Full article in Environmental Graffiti.

“More than 1,000 tornadoes affect the USA each year, with many more going unreported. Find out how these monster winds form — many from supercell thunderstorms — as well as how to protect yourself from their fury.”

Go here for the graphics.

HOME is composed of aerial images embracing the major ecological issues while saying that a solution exists.

HOME will be released on June 5th 2009 all over the globe on every format. The aim is to reach the widest audience and to convince us all of our individual and collective responsibility towards the planet.

On June 5th we all have a date with the planet ! ”

There is quite a lot of excitement surrounding this release on YouTube. Here is one of the many video previews of the movie. Outstanding quality. Watch the preview here or below.

“In the United States, the winter is generally considered ‘flu season’ and is when we see it most widespread. With the threat of a potential swine flu epidemic, analysts are trying to determine if the weather will play any factor in the spread of the virus.

The flu is spread through contact with an infected person or pig, typically through coughing or sneezing. In the winter, when most people in temperate regions like the United States are spending time indoors in closed environments and in close quarters with those that are infected, it is thought that the flu can be transmitted easier. The water droplets containing the virus are slower to evaporate in cooler weather thus remaining airborne for longer periods of time and increasing chances of others becoming infected.

Outbreaks can and do occur in the tropics however research indicates they occur with less frequency in places that do not have the seasonality that other areas do. Limited laboratory and health data from regions like Africa and Latin America have made it more difficult to track the spread of viruses and thus learn from it.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Monday that it hoped drier and warmer weather would help stifle the effects of the swine flu. The organization is asking health authorities to work with weather services to assess the role of weather and the climate in the outbreak as this is an aspect that is not fully known. WMO spokeswoman Gaelle Sevenier said , “The transmission patterns of this particular influenza and its possible seasonality are as yet not adequately understood and are the subject of ongoing investigations.”

Full story in The Examiner.

Photo from Huffington Post.

‘In the United States there are an estimated 25 million cloud to ground lightning flashes each year and each one is a potential threat to life and property. During the past 10 years there has been an annual average of 44 lightning fatalities in the United States.

Colorado is ranked # 2 in lightning related deaths (1997 – 2006) so the danger this presents to life and property is very significant for us. It is interesting to note though that Colorado ranks only 31st in the number of cloud to ground strikes over that same period. We have fewer strikes and yet more deaths. This highlights the fact that, quite frankly, folks here in Colorado are not aware of the dangers lightning presents and they simply do not take proper steps to protect themselves. One of the great things about Colorado are the outdoor activities we all enjoy, but there comes a time when we need to head indoors.

Three years ago in 2006, Colorado had the sad distinction of having more lightning fatalities than anywhere else – six of them – as well as 15 injuries from lightning. In 2007 we improved with two fatalities and six people who survived a strike. Last year, in 2008, four Coloradoans were killed by lightning and seven injured. On average, Colorado suffers three deaths and 13 injuries.
As thunderstorm season approaches, it is time to educate ourselves on the dangers of lightning.

Lightning Fast Facts

- If you can see it or hear it, lightning can hit you. Find shelter now.
- The primary rule for lightning safety: When Thunder Roars, Go Indoors!
- Lightning is the number two weather killer in the United States (behind floods), killing more than hurricanes and tornadoes combined.Lightning kills about 60 people in the U.S. each year and inflicts severe life-long debilitating injuries on at least a 1,000 people a year.
- Every 5 seconds between flash and boom is a mile’s distance from you.
- Under ideal conditions, lightning’s thunder can be heard 12 miles away.
- Lightning is really no wider than a few inches.
- “Bolts from the Blue” – These lightning flashes have been documented to travel more than 25 miles away from the thunderstorm cloud. Clear skies above you are no indication of how dangerous a nearby storm is!
- The air within a lightning strike can reach 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
- Lightning can heat its path five times hotter than the surface of the sun.
- One ground lightning stroke can generate between 100 million and 1 billion volts of electricity.”

Full story in the Examiner.

Photo from http://justin.es11webhost.com/

“Achy joints, according to folklore, point to the arrival of rain. It’s a tale told by many an arthritic grandmother, but it also holds true in medicine. Weather can influence a variety of medical conditions, worsening symptoms and, in some cases, increasing the risk of death. But keeping track of weather patterns and their impact can be time-consuming and confusing for patients. MediClim, a new online service, hopes to take the guesswork out of weather-health management.

“Dr. John Bart and meteorologist Denis Bourque have launched a free subscriber-based alert system that notifies users by email when their symptoms might be aggravated by upcoming weather conditions. The service aims to help people better manage their medical conditions. “We hope that forewarned is forearmed,” says Bart.”

“MediClim (www.mediclim.com) tracks weather patterns and associates them with 5 medical conditions: arthritis, asthma, diabetes, heart disease and migraine. Subscribers provide a small amount of personal information, including their illness, postal code and email address, and receive alerts when the weather changes in such a way that it can cause a flare-up. Most people who sign up receive 2-4 warnings a month.”

“The service is currently available in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, but Bart says they hope to roll it out across Europe, beginning with France in April. They will continue to add conditions to the database as they collect more data. “We wanted to provide people with the opportunity to understand that the environment is involved in their health and that they can do something about it,” Bart says. Although not everybody is equally affected by weather, some may find the warnings informative. For example, a woman with arthritis may want to postpone a shopping trip to the mall if the weather suggests her symptoms may worsen over the next 24 hours.”

More at CMAJ.

Photo from The Telegraph.

When Alaska’s Mount Redoubt volcano began rumbling back to life in January, a team of researchers scrambled to set up a system called a Lightning Mapping Array that would be able to peer through the dust and gas of any eruption that occurred to the lightning storm happening within. Lightning is known to flash in the tumultuous clouds belched out during volcanic eruptions.

The lightning produced when Redoubt finally erupted on March 22 was “prolific,” said physicist Paul Krehbiel of New Mexico Tech. Check out the image.
“The lightning activity was as strong or stronger than we have seen in large Midwestern thunderstorms,” Krehbiel said. “The radio frequency noise was so strong and continuous that people living in the area would not have been able to watch broadcast VHF television stations.”

Lightning mapping arrays are increasingly being used by meteorologists to issue weather warnings, but have only been deployed at volcanoes twice before.

Thousands of individual segments of a single lightning stroke can be mapped with these arrays, and later analyzed to reveal how lightning initiates and spreads through a thunderstorm, or in a volcanic plume.

After setting up the arrays, researchers waited nearly two months for Redoubt’s first eruption, but the wait was worth it. ”

Full story on Live Science

See if you can answer all the questions and get to the end of the story.

Have fun!

Click here.

The Franklin Institute Resources For Science Learning

Very well written, easily accessible and based on solid scientific knowledge.

“In the 1500s, fishermen who lived in South America began to wonder about a current of unusually warm water that came to their shore every few years near Christmastime. Since the fishermen believed in the birth of the Christ child at Christmas, and since they spoke Spanish, they named the hot water El Niño, which means “the infant” in Spanish.

Where do scientists look for El Niño? The hot water usually comes first to the coasts of Peru and Ecuador in South America.

But if we’ve known about El Niño for four hundred years, why is everyone talking so much about the hot water this year?
The 1997-1998 El Niño may or may not be stronger than ever before. Scientists are still deciding. One thing that is definitely different about this El Niño is the technology that scientists are using to study it.”

More on The Franklin Institute.

Photo from NASA.

“The U.S. has sustained 90 weather-related disasters over the past 29 years in which overall damages/costs reached or exceeded $1 billion. The total normalized losses for the 90 events exceed $700 billion.”

In 2008, 9 weather-related disasters topped the billion dollar mark.

“Widespread Drought Entire year, 2008. Severe drought and heat caused agricultural losses in areas of the south and west. Record low lake levels also occurred in areas of the southeast. Includes states of CA, TX, NC, SC, GA, and TN. Estimate of over $2.0 billion in damages/costs. Special Report

Hurricane Ike September 2008. Category 2 hurricane makes landfall in Texas, as the largest (in size) Atlantic hurricane on record, causing considerable storm surge in coastal TX and significant wind and flooding damage in TX, LA, AR, IL, IN, KY, MO, OH and PA. Severe gasoline shortages occurred in the southeast US due to damaged oil platforms, storage tanks, pipelines and off-line refineries. Estimate of over $27.0 billion in damages/costs; 82 deaths; 100 people missing. Special Report

Hurricane Gustav September 2008. Category 2 hurricane makes landfall in Louisiana causing significant wind, storm surge, and flooding damage in AL, AR, LA, and MS. Estimate of at least $5.0 billion in damages/costs; 43 deaths. Special Report

Hurricane Dolly July 2008. Category 1 hurricane makes landfall in southern Texas causing considerable wind and flooding damage in TX and NM. Over $1.2 billion in damages/costs; 3 deaths. Special Report

US Wildfires Summer-Fall 2008. Drought conditions across numerous western, central and southeastern states (AK, AZ, CA, NM, ID, UT, MT, NV, OR, WA, CO, TX, OK, NC, FL ) resulted in thousands of wildfires; national acreage burned exceeding 5.2 million acres (mainly in the west) and over 1,000 homes and structures destroyed in California fires alone. Over $2.0 billion in damages/costs; 16 deaths. Special Report

Midwest Flood June 2008. Heavy rain and flooding caused significant agricultural loss and property damage in IA, IL, IN, MO, MN, NE, and WI with IA being hardest hit with widespread rainfall totals ranging from 4 to over 16 inches. Estimate of over $15 billion in damages/costs; 24 deaths. Special Report

Midwest/Mid-Atlantic Severe Weather/Tornadoes June 2008. An outbreak of tornadoes and thunderstorms over the Midwest/Mid-Atlantic states (IA, IL, IN, KS, NE, MI, MN, MO, OK, WI, MD, VA, WV). Over $1.1 billion in damages/costs; 18 deaths. Special Report

Midwest/Ohio Valley Severe Weather/Tornadoes May 2008. Outbreak of tornadoes over the Midwest/Ohio Valley regions (IL, IN, IA, KS, MN, NE, OK, WY, CO) with 235 tornadoes confirmed. Over $2.4 billion in damages/costs; 13 deaths. Special Report

Southeast/Midwest Tornadoes February 2008. Series of tornadoes and severe thunderstorms across the Southeast and Midwest states (AL, AR, IN, KY, MS, OH, TN, TX) with 87 tornadoes confirmed. Over $1.0 billion in damages/costs; 57 deaths. Special Report”

More information on billion dollar disasters from previous years at NCDC.

Photo from SeanBuckley.ca.

Fascinating reading about a special group of people.

The story starts like this.

“The tornado of a lifetime snakes down a South Dakota road toward Tim Samaras, an engineer and avid tornado chaser from Denver. Minutes earlier, the storm had destroyed the tiny village of Manchester, fortunately with no loss of life. Samaras and a National Geographic team spent months on the front lines of severe storms research. Their mission was to place weather-measuring probes in the path of a tornado—then get out of the way.

The chasers speed away, debris roaring in above them: Nails, wire, two-by-fours whip by in winds that soon reach 200 miles (322 kilometers) an hour.

7:40 p.m.

Cut off by the tornado as it rushes toward the road, the chasers pause to plot their route. A wrong turn could be fatal. 7:46 p.m. Fishtailing over a muddy road, the team races to get ahead of the twister and plant probes in its path. 7:50 p.m. Thinning into a rope shape, the tornado crosses the road, snapping power poles and fences.”

You can read the rest of the story in National Geographic.