Climate science
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Did you know that you can use cricket and katydid chirps to estimate the temperature? Dolbear’s Law is the formula from the late 19th century that can be used to accurately estimate the temperature based on the number of chirps a cricket emits. Basically, crickets chirp faster when it is warm than when it is…
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Becky Griffin from UGA’s Center for Urban Ag has a new publication out on starting a school garden. You can find it at https://extension.uga.edu/publications/detail.cfm?number=C1101. It has some great ideas for organizing it! I would add that adding a rain gauge or weather instruments to the garden is a great way to teach the kids about…
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Red sprites are a high-altitude extremely rapid lightning discharge that happens over thunderstorms. According to a recent National Geographic post, “sometimes called “upward lightning” and “cloud-to-stratospheric lightning,” sprites are momentary bursts of electricity that can literally reach the edge of space, about 50 miles above the ground. They’re rarely documented because they are so short…
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Last week in this blog I posted a couple of stories about the unusual number of warm nights experienced in New Orleans and then about questions surrounding the accuracy of the record. In response to these questions, the Louisiana State Climatologist has posted this article about what he found out about the station and…
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EarthSky has an interesting story this week on why leaves change color in the fall. Also includes some beautiful pictures of autumn foliage. Check it out at https://earthsky.org/earth/why-do-tree-leaves-turn-red-in-fall.
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A new study in Nature magazine describes a new very-long-term temperature record assembled by a scientist at Stanford University from 61 different proxy climate records. Proxy records are climate records based on things like tree rings, ocean sediments and ice cores which change depending on climate factors like temperature. The new record shows temperatures for…
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After yesterday’s post on the record number of days with a warm night in New Orleans, some of my meteorologist friends and I have been discussing why there might be such a drastic change. My friend Scott Lindstrom from the University of Wisconsin-Madison posted the graph below, which shows a step function change in the…