Interesting weather images
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This isn’t really about the weather, but is very cool nonetheless. EarthSky has a fascinating video of flocking starlings moving together in movements of incredible grace that appear hypnotic. The movements are called a “murmuration.” The birds seem to anticipate each others’ movements, leading to waves of movement through the flock. But how do they…
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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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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 am a sucker for time lapse videos of clouds. The World Meteorological Organization has a new one called “Understanding Clouds” with some spectacular footage of clouds. I think the title of the video is a big misleading because the clouds are just shown with dramatic music rather than an explanation of how clouds are…
Posted in: Interesting weather images -
Here is a link to a fantastic video of a supercell thunderstorm simulated by a supercomputer. The work was done by Dr. Leigh Orf, who was a graduate student at University of Wisconsin-Madison at the same time I was. He is now doing these super in-depth visualizations of supercells and discerning how they form and…
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The South Carolina State Climate Office, in conjunction with other cooperators, has released an online story map of the disastrous flooding in October 2015 that has won several awards for its report. You might like to take a look at it. It contains information about the setup for the flood, which included the impacts of…
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From NASA’s web page: “Since the 1920s, excessive pumping of groundwater in California’s San Joaquin Valley has caused land in sections of the valley to sink by as much as 28 feet (8.5 meters), a problem exacerbated during droughts, when farmers rely heavily on groundwater to sustain one of the most productive agricultural regions in…