Weather Break

Click here to listen to episode 788 of Weather Break.
While larger hailstones certainly do exist, the vast majority of the hail that falls from thunderstorms comes in the form of relatively small chunks of ice — rarely bigger than a golf ball.  As it happens, there have been a couple of incidents lately in which [...]

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Click here to listen to this episode of Weather Break.
Most of the interesting and severe weather that people care about is caused by rising motions in the atmosphere. Clouds, for example, are always regions where air is rising, and therefore so are thunderstorms and hurricanes and, well, pretty much anything exciting in the weather. On [...]

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Click here to listen to episode 707 of Weather Break.
Over the weekend, a major tornado struck parts of Mississippi.  This severe weather outbreak, however, did not catch forecasters off-guard because they have a whole toolkit of calculations and computations that can be used to suggest the chances of severe weather in a particular region at [...]

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Click here to listen to episode 649 of Weather Break.
Lightning rods are a proven technology for reducing the risk of fires when lightning strikes the roof of a building.  The rod itself is actually designed to get struck itself, safely conducting the enormous amounts of electricity into the ground.  The basic principles behind a lightning [...]

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Click here to listen to episode 577 of Weather Break.
From time to time in the summer, you might here someone refer to flashes of light seen on the horizon around sunset as “heat lightning”.  As it turns out, heat lightning really isn’t any different from regular lightning–it’s just occurring too far away from you for [...]

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