Climate science
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If you like to watch the clouds but don’t know what they are, you might enjoy this 9-minute video from the Cloud Appreciation Society’s founder, Gavin Pretor-Pinney. He starts with the lowest cloud types and moves up to the highest clouds. If you want to learn more, you can also visit the Cloud Appreciation Society…
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Here’s a very cool video that shows how the shape of falling raindrops is not the teardrop shape that we drew as kids. Instead, it is closer to the shape of a hamburger bun. This video also shows how the size distribution of raindrops in a storm was originally measured using a pan of flour…
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One of the questions I am often asked is how much agriculture contributes to the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. It’s a difficult question because you need to keep track of a lot of different things, like how land is used, what kinds of chemicals are used, what management methods are in place,…
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As the earth gets warmer, the water cycle is getting amped up, with both more droughts and more floods. On the wet side of that swing, the statistics of flooding events is showing a trend towards more extreme values. This is important because a lot of our infrastructure, including how roads, dams, and sewers are…
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It is now generally agreed by scientists that liquid water used to exist on Mars, and that liquid contributed to some of the geological features that we can still see on the surface of Mars today. But there is no liquid water on Mars now, and even the amount of liquid water that remains in…
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Tom Skilling, WGN television meteorologist, gave this report on Facebook today about the volcanic eruption that is ongoing in the Caribbean: The Caribbean’s La Soufriere Volcano isn’t likely to have the cooling effect of 1991’s mammoth Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines–but it’s released the most sulfur dioxide of any Caribbean volcano of the satellite…
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I love clouds, and so was very excited to see this in the news today. The Mars rover, Curiosity, has taken its first pictures of Martian clouds! They look a lot like cirrus clouds on earth, but it is not clear if they have the same chemical composition that earth clouds do. You can read…