Climate science
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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…
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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…
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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…
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If you follow news articles about changing climate, you have no doubt seen many stories about melting sea ice, glaciers, and the big ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. You might wonder why those changes are important to us here in the Southeast. Let me use a couple of recent articles I have seen to…
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Time magazine had an interesting story on the history of the invention of the thermometer that you might enjoy. It includes information on how the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales were developed and how Galileo invented a precursor of the thermometer called the thermoscope. You can read it here.
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A recent study published in the journal Nature shows that as temperatures rise around the globe, the amount of oxygen that is dissolved in the water is decreasing. The rate of decrease is much larger in freshwater lakes than in the ocean. This is concerning because as oxygen levels decrease, life in the streams and…