Weather Break

Click here to listen to episode 617 of Weather Break.
When you think about the extremes of weather that a bridge needs to be able to withstand, it’s actually pretty amazing that more bridges don’t collapse during severe weather events.  Probably the most famous weather-related bridge failure would be the case of the notorious Tacoma Narrows [...]

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Click here to listen to episode 608 of Weather Break.
America’s collection of geostationary weather satellites go by the name “GOES”–”Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite”–and the newest member of that class of satellites was launched just this summer.  This satellite, known as GOES-14, is currently going through a battery of tests to make sure that all of [...]

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Click here to listen to episode 604 of Weather Break.
As we discussed yesterday on Weather Break, anemometers are instruments that meteorologists use to measure the speed of the wind.  They can be as simple as a “cup anemometer”, or as fancy and expensive as a “hot wire anemometer”.  Another high-tech way to measure the winds [...]

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Click here to listen to episode 603 of Weather Break.
The kind of instrument that a meteorologist uses to measure the winds is called an anemometer.  The most familiar kind of anemometer is the so-called “cup anemometer”– the kind with the little cups that spin in the wind like a propeller.  However, cup anemometers aren’t particularly [...]

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Click here to listen to episode 592 of Weather Break.
Today we’re continuing Weather Break’s special coverage of the use of weather balloons in meteorology by talking about the so-called “constant level balloons”.  The regular balloons that the National Weather Service uses are designed to rise quite rapidly, popping and falling back to the ground within [...]

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