Weather Break

Click here to listen to episode 580 of Weather Break.
The meteorology community is buzzing about the possible discovery of a “new” type of cloud, tentatively named “Undulatus asperatus”.  When we say that this is a “new” type of cloud, that doesn’t mean that these clouds hadn’t happened in the past–it just means that in that [...]

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Click here to listen to episode 529 of Weather Break.
Observations of the current weather are key to making good weather forecasts, but few features of the atmosphere are as hard to reliably observe as clouds. NASA’s CloudSat mission fills important gaps in our understanding of the distribution of clouds with its downward-pointer radar. [...]

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Click here to listen to this episode of Weather Break.
Meteorologists think of cirrus clouds as being “high clouds”, and they certainly ARE the highest clouds commonly found in the troposphere.  Cirrus clouds might be as much as 7 or 8 miles above the surface of the earth.  However, when it comes to altitude they’re no [...]

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Click here to listen to this episode of Weather Break.
Historically, clouds were a particularly difficult phenomenon to study. Their great height and the very small size of the individual cloud droplets made it very difficult to early meteorologists and atmospheric scientists to study and understand how clouds work. Those problems led to lots of misunderstandings [...]

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Click here to listen to episode 454 of Weather Break.
Historically, clouds were a particularly difficult phenomenon to study. Their great height and the very small size of the individual cloud droplets made it very difficult to early meteorologists and atmospheric scientists to study and understand how clouds work. Those problems led to lots [...]

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