Climate science
-
Here is an excellent piece describing trends in tornadoes in the United States over time from Yale Climate Connections. The online title asks if climate change is affecting tornado climatology, and the short answer is “not as far as we can tell now”. There are some trends towards seeing more tornadoes, especially weak ones, that…
-
In The Garden Professors blog this week, John Porter of Nebraska Extension posts an article describing how water provides both necessary moisture and a contributor to diseases that can hurt plant growth, and in the worst cases, kill the plant completely. The article describes how water in the atmosphere contributes to the development of fungal…
-
As I am writing, the rain from TS Elsa is falling outside. The tree frogs are going nuts! The remains of Elsa are crossing Georgia’s coastal plain tonight, and it is headed off to the northeast towards the Carolinas and Virginia. It is expected to be a tropical depression by the time it hits North…
-
You have been hearing about all the extremely hot temperatures that have recently occurred in the Pacific Northwest. How do they compare to the record high temperatures around the world? You can see a map of the records for each continent below. In 2021 so far, Kuwait has had the hottest temperature, with a reading…
-
I ran across this tidbit of information on Facebook today, posted by my husband John Knox, who is also a meteorologist. It discusses the 1967 prediction of global warming by Manabe and Wetherald, in a time period when the earth was slowly cooling. You probably don’t know their names, but they were well-known in atmospheric…
Posted in: Climate science -
If you thought that we were the warmest in our Northern Hemisphere summer because the Earth is closest to the sun then, you are in good company with Harvard students (according to a videotaped survey my husband uses in his intro meteorology class) but scientifically wrong. Today is actually Aphelion, the day when the Earth…
-
The extremely high temperatures out west in recent days have had a number of consequences. One you might not have thought of is the impact on air travel. Airplanes have trouble taking off if the air is too hot because the density is reduced, affecting the lift. For more about this and other heat-related impacts…