Latest Atmospheric sciences Stories
Daily weather forecast and wrap-up provided by redOrbit meteorologist Joshua Kelly. redOrbit Meteorologist Joshua Kelly Big Story Weather from April 16: Another round of snow arrived in the Northern Plains and extended back towards Colorado. Severe weather also fired up over the Southern Plains. The rest of the country enjoyed a nice Spring day. Big Story Weather Discussion for April 17: Low pressure moving over Western Texas will bring showers and thunderstorms to the...
COLLEGE STATION, Texas, April 16, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Texas A&M University's student storm chasing team looks for the kind of weather that sent Dorothy and Toto over the rainbow - and the nastier the better. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20120502/DC99584LOGO) Believed to be the only student-run storm chasing team in Texas, the Texas Aggie Storm Chasers, or TASC for short, knows that when it's springtime in Texas, Mother Nature can put on quite a show and...
University of Zurich The climate governs the seasonal activity of vegetation; humankind influences it. In the humid mid-latitudes, temperature is the largest influencing factor for plant growth. In predominantly dry areas, however, it is the availability of water and in the high latitudes incident solar radiation. Without a doubt, humankind also has a modifying impact on the ecosystem. Satellites have been recording how the vegetation on the Earth's surface is changing since the 1980s....
University of Hawaii - SOEST Projections of rainfall changes from global warming have been very uncertain because scientists could not determine how two different mechanisms will impact rainfall. The two mechanisms turn out to complement each other and together shape the spatial distribution of seasonal rainfall in the tropics, according to the study of a group of Chinese and Hawaii scientists that is published in the April 14, 2013, online issue of Nature Geoscience. The one mechanism,...
Daily weather forecast and wrap-up provided by redOrbit meteorologist Joshua Kelly. redOrbit Meteorologist Joshua Kelly Big Story Weather from April 15: The new storm system moving through the Southwest and Rockies has been dropping snow and rain in this region, with some places getting over six inches of snow and near one inch of rainfall. The second story was the strong thunderstorms that moved across South Florida yesterday. Last night the severe weather that started across the...
New super strong windows withstand impact of 2x4s hurled by EF5 winds. Joplin, MO (PRWEB) April 15, 2013 Like a chain and its weakest link, the strength of a hospital’s outer shell depends on its most fragile pieces – the windows. That’s a crucial lesson from the May 2011 tornado that ravaged the old St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Joplin. And it’s knowledge Mercy is using to better protect its new Joplin hospital and facilities across four states in tornado alley....
NASA On April 16, 2008, a suite of NASA instruments was launched into space to study a unique region of Earth’s upper atmosphere: the electrically charged region called the ionosphere. The instruments, known collectively as CINDI (Coupled Ion-Neutral Dynamics Investigation), fly aboard an Air Force Research Laboratory satellite called C/NOFS (Communications/Navigation Outage Forecasting System) to study this region that hovers some 60 to 400 miles above Earth. The ionosphere is...
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center An upper-level low pressure system is sapping the cloud and thunderstorm development on the western side of Cyclone Victoria in the Southern Indian Ocean. New NASA satellite imagery showed that the bulk of rainfall was located east of the storm's center. At 0900 UTC (5 a.m. EDT) on April 12, Tropical Cyclone Imelda was tropical storm strength with maximum sustained winds near 45 knots (51.7 mph/83.3 kph). Imelda was centered near 14.1 south latitude and...
Part 5 of redOrbit’s exclusive 6-part series Alan McStravick for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The last part of this exclusive series focused on the technologies behind the Earth Networks Total Lightning Network (ENTLN) and their computer and mobile-based platforms for delivery of weather information to the general public. For part 5, I sat down with the company’s senior meteorologist James West to discuss the important role played by humans in weather prediction for their...
Daily weather forecast and wrap-up provided by redOrbit meteorologist Joshua Kelly. redOrbit Meteorologist Joshua Kelly Big Story Weather from April 12-14: Another very busy weekend as another storm system pushed through the Plains bringing ice, snow and strong winds to the north and another round of severe weather to the Gulf Coast. Wind damage was sporadic across the Gulf Coast with wind gusts near 65-70mph along the MS Gulf Coast during this event. Snowfall amounts around 6+...
Latest Atmospheric sciences Reference Libraries
An urban heat island (UHI) is a metropolitan area that is drastically warmer than its surrounding rural areas because of human activities. The phenomenon was first looked into and described by Luke Howard during the 1810s, although he wasn’t the one to name the phenomenon. The difference in temperature is normally bigger at night as opposed to during the day, and it most obvious when winds are weak. Seasonally, UHI is seen during the summer and the winter. The key cause of the urban heat...
Desertification is a form of land degradation in which a comparatively dry land area becomes more and more arid, normally losing its bodies of water along with its wildlife and vegetation. This is a result of a variety of factors, such as climate change and human activities. Desertification is an important global, ecological, and environmental issue. There is substantial controversy over the proper definition of the term “desertification”. The most broadly accepted of these is that of...
Climate change is a substantial and lasting change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns over periods of time ranging from decades to millions of years. It might be a change in the average weather conditions, or in the distribution of weather around the average conditions. Climate change is a result of factors that include oceanic processes, biotic processes, variations in solar radiation received buy Earth, volcanic eruptions, and plate tectonics, and human induced alterations...
Surface Dew-points can play a huge role in weather forecasting. The first such role is that it helps determine the amount of moisture in the atmosphere for a given point. If we look at the current dew-point map above from January 28, 2013 we can note several things of interest. First, if we look at where the black circle is around the number 70, we can make note that this air right off the coast of Texas is at a dew point of 70F. The temperature outside must be above 70F, because the...
Air mass thunderstorms are found in marine time tropical air. In short they are also known as MT Thunderstorms. Air mass thunderstorms represent what is known as the common three stage thunderstorm development. This means that an air mass thunderstorm goes through the stages of Cumulus which is represented by the updrafts only being present; secondly it moves into the mature stage where it has both updrafts and downdrafts; finally it goes into the dissipating stage where you see only the...
