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Following the launch of Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957, both the Soviets and the United States went into a flurry of satellite building. As part of that race to space, on April 1, 1960, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) launched the Television Infra-Red Observation Satellite (TIROS-1), the world’s first successful weather satellite.…
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After a beautiful sunny weekend, rain should return to most of the Southeast this week with a vengeance, with up to five inches over the next seven days forecast in a few isolated spots. This will be great news for farmers and others concerned about the abnormally dry conditions which have developed across much of…
Posted in: Climate outlooks -
The month of March is almost complete, and overall in the Southeast it’s been a very dry month, with large parts of the region receiving less than half their normal rainfall. No wonder the abnormally dry area in the Drought Monitor expanded so much this week! It’s also been a little above normal in temperature…
Posted in: Climate summaries -
Our NWS radar has come a long ways from the days of the old black and white radars! Now we have dual-pol doppler radar in multi-color with all kinds of bells and whistles, but this image shows what they had to work with in 1973. The hook echo just to the southwest of the center…
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I occasionally hear someone say that volcanoes emit more carbon dioxide than any manmade source. The blog at NOAA’s Climate.gov discusses this “fact” and shows that in fact human activities such as burning fossil fuels, deforestation and cement production put out 60 times as much CO2 as natural sources like volcanic eruptions. Of course, for…
Posted in: Climate science -
The latest Drought Monitor, released this morning, shows that extreme (D3) drought has been removed from Alabama and North Carolina due to recent rains in the area. However, generally warmer and drier conditions in most of the rest of the region has led to an expansion of dry and droughty conditions across the region. D0…
Posted in: Drought -
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution noted this morning that a variety of local spring crops are making an early appearance in stores this year due to the extremely warm winter and spring we have been having. In addition to local strawberries, asparagus, onions and pea shoots are all available in markets around the area. They are showing…