History
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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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If you are reading the digest version of this blog, you will probably see it on Sunday, June 6. That date is the anniversary of D-Day, the invasion at Normandy Beach. I had the privilege of visiting there in 1980 and camped near the beach as part of a tour of Europe after college. It…
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The Dust Bowl era caused tremendous losses to farmers in the central US in the 1930s. The reasons for the occurrence of the Dust Bowl are complex, but one of the factors that caused the loss of soil and farms was the method that producers used to farm at the time, which broke up the…
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In Japan, they have been keeping track of the peak bloom date of their beautiful cherry blossoms for over 1,200 years. This year, they bloomed earlier than ever before, beating out the old record set in 1409 by a day. After holding steady for the first thousand years of the record, the date of the…
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As always, there are many stories being published about climate and agriculture in the news. Here are some of the latest interesting ones I have read. They cover a variety of topics from cloud seeding to atmospheric optics to water quality impacts on eagles (featuring work by UGA professor Susan Wilde). The Guardian: US states…
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In the 1930s, tremendous dust storms blew across the Great Plains, with some dust reaching all the way to Washington DC. It has been attributed partially to climate variability and partly to land management patterns which plowed up the fields and left them bare, which made them vulnerable to strong winds. A change in the…
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On Twitter today, I found a reference to an interesting set of National Weather Service reports that describe past extreme weather events, including a number in the Southeast such as large hurricane events like Michael and Katrina and tornado outbreaks such as the major outbreak of 2011. These reports are geared toward both describing the…