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Today’s weather oddity comes from Atlas Obscura, who noted in an article this week that the height of the Washington Monument was almost half an inch lower than originally built due to repeated lightning strikes on the top, melting the metal cap. You can read more about this fascinating story at https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/washington-monument-lightning-rod.
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If you are interested in the water resources across the Southeast, you might want to watch the latest Water Resources Outlook on YouTube produced by the National Weather Service Southeast River Forecast Center. You can watch it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt3dO1WT7n8&feature=youtu.be. There are no tropical storms coming in the near term, but if we get one, a lot…
Posted in: Climate outlooks -
If you are interested in climate science and how climatologists view climate change, you might be interested in this video series called “Global Weirding” by Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University. In the series, which releases a new video every two weeks, Dr. Hayhoe explains the science behind global warming and addresses many myths about…
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The latest Drought Monitor, released this morning, shows that rain has reduced the scattered spots of abnormally dry conditions in eastern Alabama, although there was a slight expansion of abnormally dry conditions in the northwest part of that state. Elsewhere, small spots of dry conditions persist. No drought is expected to develop over the next…
Posted in: Drought -
Here is an interesting story by Eddie McGriff from the Southeast Farm Press about the impacts of a layer of hardpan below the surface of an Alabama cotton field on plant growth. One of the most interesting impacts to me as a climatologist was the impact of breaking up the hardpan on floods and droughts.…
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If you have not been following the recent weather news, you may have missed the news that a Category 4 hurricane named Lane is bearing down on the Hawaiian Islands and is expected to cause impacts there even if the center misses the islands, as it is expected to do. As bad as the winds…
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Earlier today I posted a story about how much natural disasters cost each state. But how much do they cost the nation as a whole? GoBankingRates.com has a short article which describes what the costs of some recent disasters have been here. A lot of the costs are absorbed locally but in the big disasters, money…
Posted in: Climate and Ag in the news