Climate science
-
Stockholm University noted some recent research by a team of scientists there on the brightness of high-level clouds affected by airplane exhaust. Cloud brightness is important for climate because it helps control how much sunlight (and thus energy) reaches the surface of the earth. Brighter clouds–more reflection of sunlight back to space–less energy at the…
-
Summer in the Northern Hemisphere is generally the time when the monsoon develops in India. The monsoon provides the major rain that allows crops to grow in that country, and the failure of the monsoon causes immense suffering, crop damage and famine in the area. Even though you might think that “monsoon” is just a…
-
Water vapor and carbon dioxide are both contributors to greenhouse warming on the Earth. I’ve gotten questions from time to time about their relative importance to greenhouse warming. Dr. Marshall Shepherd of UGA provides a good discussion of the topic in a recent Forbes.com blog post here.
-
Earthzine published an interesting article earlier this month about the decrease in wind speeds that have occurred in recent years compared to the longer-term average. You can read it at https://earthzine.org/2016/06/10/a-new-kind-of-drought-u-s-record-low-windiness-in-2015/. This is important because of our increasing use of wind power to provide electricity, since lower wind speeds are less efficient for power production and…
-
The summer solstice arrives on Monday at 6:34 EDT. You can read about what it is on the WunderBlog at https://www.wunderground.com/news/summer-solstice-first-day-summer-20140619#prclt-JnRYWA1s. You might also be interested to read about the difference in the length of day from north to south at EarthSky here. Happy astronomical summer!
-
Dr. Marshall Shepherd of UGA published a new column in Forbes.com this week about mammatus clouds, the beautiful and sometimes scary clouds that form on the undersides of severe thunderstorms (and occasionally in other places as well). You can read his blog post here. The Cloud Appreciation Society also has some great pictures of mammatus…
-
While it seems to be pretty intuitive that parking in the shade helps keep your car cool, there has been surprisingly little data collected to show how much cooler it is. The State Climatologist of Arizona, Nancy Selover, has contributed to a recent article describing their work to measure car temperatures in sun and shade…