Health
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As temperature and humidity rises, conditions for living safely without heat-related illnesses become less frequent. Days with very high temperature and humidity lead to increases in heat stress and illness as well as deaths. A study published in Nature Communications concluded that “deadly conditions have already placed hundreds of millions of people at grave risk.” The…
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If you don’t suffer from asthma, you might be surprised to know that an episode of difficult breathing can be triggered by a thunderstorm. The Weather Channel recently posted a story about how air flow in a thunderstorm can make asthma worse by concentrating pollen and dust particles beneath the downdraft of the storm. Those…
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I got an email a week or so ago asking me about “fungal storms” and how they are changing over time. This was the first time I had ever heard of this phrase, which sounds to me like something out of science fiction. So I did a little research and found out that this is…
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If you have ever flown on an airplane, you are no doubt familiar with the bumpy conditions associated with turbulence. These conditions can be caused by a number of factors, including air rising as it moves across mountains, updrafts in thunderstorms, and clear air turbulence caused by waves at high altitudes far from more active…
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Today is the anniversary of the Great Savannah Fire of January 11, 1820, which destroyed over 500 building and costing roughly $4 million (equivalent to $90 million in 2024) in damages. The fire was caused by months of very dry conditions followed by a day with strong winds from the northwest. The high winds fanned…
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Are you tired of cloudy conditions and the lack of sunshine? Do you have Seasonal Affective Disorder because it is so dark and gloomy all winter? While we get more sunshine here in the Southeast than my childhood home in western Michigan where the lake effect dominates the weather most of the winter, we still…
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Those of you who have had to deal with the aftermath of recent tropical disasters like Hurricanes Helene, Ian, and Matthew will likely relate to the days of heat that emergency workers had to deal with during the clean-up of the storms. Some of my colleagues at the University of Georgia recently published a paper…