Climate science
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I am attending the EDEN (Extension Disaster Education Network) annual meeting up in Grand Rapids, MI, this week (my hometown!). I have been enjoying all of the colors of the trees, especially the sugar maples that are fiery red/orange at peak color. Here is a story from EarthSky explaining why the leaves change color. In…
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Today is the first day of astronomical fall, as we cross the ecliptic and start to see days that are shorter than 12 hours due to the tilt of the earth’s North Pole away from the sun. And even though it’s felt like summer for most of the month, the cold front that went through…
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Fog is at atmospheric phenomenon that occurs many places, including here in the Southeast, but for some places like San Francisco, fog is a necessary part of the ambiance of the environment as well as an important source for moisture during the dry season. But fog is becoming less frequent in the coastal areas of…
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If you know something about hurricane climatology, you probably already know that the peak of hurricane season is in early to mid-September based on the likelihood of a named storm occurring on any particular date. But it turns out that there are different ways to determine it based on counts, tropical storm energy, and other…
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You may see the National Hurricane Center daily maps showing the likely areas of development for tropical storms and wonder how long it takes the storm to get close enough to the Southeast to worry about. This excellent map from Ed Piotrowski shows the average number of days it takes for a storm to get…
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Studies of past weather and climate events can be useful in terms of helping us to figure out current and future climate, because they give us a way to test climate models and assumptions about climate behavior. This story from Yale Climate Connections describes a volcanic eruption that occurred in Alaska in 43 BCE that…
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You might think that summer is warmer than winter because the earth is closer to the sun. But in fact, the earth’s orbit takes us farthest from the sun in summer, on a date called the aphelion. This year’s aphelion is today, July 4. EarthSky posted an interesting story from 2018 with a photo that…