Christophorus Henricus Diedericus Buys Ballot was born on this date in 1817. He was a Dutch chemist and meteorologist, and the rule that came to be known as Buys Ballot’s Law is his most enduring contribution to science.  According to Buys Ballot’s Law, if you stand with your back to the wind at the surface of the Earth, an area of low pressure is to your left and an area of high pressure is to your right.  Today, in an era of satellites and supercomputers in meteorology, this might seem simplistic and unhelpful, but this was an amazing discovery back in the 19th century.  You can well imagine how useful this was, for example, to sailors at sea, as it gave them a fairly easy way to figure out where storm systems (which are generally areas of low pressure) were.  Today on Weather Break, Dr. Jon Schrage of the Creighton University Department of Atmospheric Sciences explains the significance of Buys Ballot’s Law and why it works.

Links:

For more information about Buys Ballot, try Wikipedia as a convenient starting place.  That site also has a handy summary of Buys Ballot’s Law.

Don’t like how Dr. Schrage pronounces “Buys Ballot”?  Here’s a recording of a native of Holland saying the name.  I got this recording from this page.

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 is to use a device called a “sonic anemometer”, which takes advantage of the fact that sound travels more rapidly downwind than it does upwind.  By precisely timing how long it takes for an ultrasonic chirp to travel between two sensors, a sonic anemometer can very accurately measure the winds.  Combine the information from three sonic anemometers oriented at right angles to each other, and a meteorologist can even determine the three-dimensional wind speed and direction–something that a traditional anemometer cannot do.

Links:

For more information about sonic anemometers, visit Campbell Scientific, WikiAnswers, Gill Instruments, or meteo-technology.com.

For pictures of sonic anemometers, use this Google Image Search on the term “sonic anemometer”.

Global Warming has become — no pun intended — a heated debate, especially in the United States.  Some folks says that society needs to make big changes to how it uses energy in order to reduce the impact of climate change.  Other people say that the science is not clear enough yet to justify big and expensive policy changes.  In the national debate, however, we hardly ever hear from a third group, one who is saying that it doesn’t really matter WHAT the nations of the world agree to do about greenhouse gas emissions.  These people hold the rather pessimistic (but possibly correct!) point of view that we have already added too many greenhouse gases and other emissions into the atmosphere and that the damage has already been done.  According to this point of view, all that mankind can do now it try to figure out how to live with the consequences of the actions of this and previous generations — they say that reducing our usage of fossil fuels now will make very little difference and probably isn’t worth the work.  What can we learn from this strange opinion?  Tune in to today’s episode of Weather Break to find out!

Links:

Here are some examples of stories in which people believe that it may already be too late to prevent climate change via the enhanced greenhouse effect:  New Statesman, San Francisco Chronicle, this blog, or The Independent.

Everyone has heard of the “monsoon”, which brings a strong rainy season to places like India or West Africa.  What you might NOT know is that monsoons aren’t just something that happen far away in distant, tropical corners of the world.  Here in the United States, there is a prominent “Arizona monsoon” (or, more correctly, “North American Monsoon”), which brings almost all of the annual rainfall to the deserts of the southwestern United States.  On today’s episode of Weather Break, we take a look at what the Arizona monsoon means for the people of that state.

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For more information about the Arizona monsoon, we recommend the University of Arizona, the National Weather Service Office in Tuscon or About.com.

“Weather enthusiasts” know that each evening on the news the meteorologist is going to tell you the humidity– usually expressed as the “relative humidity”, which is given as a percent.  It’s a measure of the ratio of how much water vapor the air “is holding” to how much water vapor the air “could be holding” if it were saturated.  This business of air being ABLE to hold a certain amount of water vapor before becoming saturated is a common thread in meteorology, but what really determines the amount of water vapor that air “can hold”?  Tune in to today’s episode of Weather Break to find out!

Links:

For more information about how much water vapor air “can hold”, check out WikiAnswers, Yahoo Answers, or any of the past episodes of Weather Break in our ongoing “Water and Weather” series.

Have you seen the pictures in the news lately about the big dust storms going on in Australia?  Eastern Australia — especially the city of Sydney — was blanketed by a thick coating of dust last week.  The pictures from those days make Sydney seem like it’s on another planet– there’s thick red dust hanging in the air, obscuring visibility.  The images almost look like something that the Mars rovers would have taken.  Are dusts storms somehow “different” from regular storms, and why do some storms kick up so much more dust than other ones do?  We tackle the issues on today’s episode of Weather Break.

Links:

We promised you lots of stories and pictures from the dust storms in Australia:

• ABC
• Huffington Post
• BBC
• New Zealand Herald
• The Northern Star
• Monsters and Critics
• CCTV

We found hundreds of great pictures of the Australian dust storms on Flickr.

]]> http://weatherbreak2.creighton.edu/?feed=rss2&p=2218 Click here to listen to episode 597 of Weather Break. Have you seen the pictures in the news lately about the big dust storms going on in Australia?  Eastern Australia — especially the city of Sydney — was blanketed by a thick coating of dust last week.  The pictures from those days make Sydney seem like it’s on another planet– there’s thick red dust hanging in the air, obscuring visibility.  The images almost look like something that the Mars rovers would have taken.  Are dusts storms somehow “different” from regular storms, and why do some storms kick up so much more dust than other ones do?  We tackle the issues on today’s episode of Weather Break. Links: We promised you lots of stories and pictures from the dust storms in Australia: ABC Huffington Post BBC New Zealand Herald The Northern Star Monsters and Critics CCTV We found hundreds of great pictures of the Australian dust storms on Flickr. Click here to listen to episode 597 of Weather Break. Have you seen the pictures in the news lately about the big dust storms going on in Australia?  Eastern Australia — especially the city of Sydney — was blanketed by a thick coating [...] http://weatherbreak2.creighton.edu/?p=2215 http://weatherbreak2.creighton.edu/?p=2215#comments Mon, 28 Sep 2009 06:00:16 +0000 schragej http://weatherbreak2.creighton.edu/?p=2215 Click here to listen to episode 596 of Weather Break.

Climate change and global warming have become — no pun intended — heated topics of debate in the United States in recent years.  There are legitimate scientific questions and issues on both sides of the discussion about whether or not human activity is contributing to the observes changes in the global climate, and scientists with differing opinions can argue their sides in good faith.  It’s all part of the scientific process, and while it might look “messy” or “political” to people outside of the scientific community, it’s actually a healthy part of how good research gets done.  However, it’s also the case that there are voices in the climate debate who are being less honest or less clear about the issues.  When you hear someone on TV or the radio talking about climate change — on EITHER side of the issue — how do you know whether you are getting good information or whether that person stands to gain financially based on changes in public opinion or policy.  On today’s episode of Weather Break, we take a look at some of the online resources that you can use to help find good, honest sources of information.

Links:

Probably the best source of unbiased analysis of the opinions that you hear on TV or the radio is SourceWatch.  They analyze the funding and opinions of various people who speak on controversial issues like climate change or the petroleum prices to look for biases, hidden agendas, and financial conflicts of interest.

Yesterday on Weather Break, we told the story of C. LeRoy Meisinger and his attempts to show the usefulness of MANNED weather balloons back in the 1910s and 1920s.  Today, of course, weather balloons are strictly UNMANNED, and with good reason.  While it certainly is true that Meisinger and his team made extraordinary observations in their test flights, the whole experiment came to a tragic end in the summer of 1924, when they launched their balloon without having any way of knowing that there was a strong line of thunderstorms approaching the area.  Both Meisinger and his pilot perished in the resulting explosion.  For the details of what happened, tune in to today’s episode of Weather Break.

Links:

This article by Meisinger was important in the writing of today’s episode of Weather Break. You can find more of Meisinger’s interesting articles here.

Much of the information about Meisinger’s last balloon flight came from this journal article. (If you would like a copy of this article and the security on the AMS’s website won’t let you have it, just contact us and we’ll be glad to send you a copy.) You can also read more about Meisinger’s untimely end here.

All this week on Weather Break, we’ve been talking about weather balloons and their applications in meteorology.  The weather balloons that are used today are relatively small and can’t really lift all that much weight.  Therefore, the package of instruments that the weather balloon carries — known as the “radiosonde” — has to be quite light.  Typically, the radiosonde weighs less than a pound.  Needless to say, therefore, modern weather balloons are unmanned; the equipment in the radiosonde simply radios its observations back to the ground station as the balloon rises.  Relatively few meteorologists, however, are aware that that Weather Bureau experimented with MANNED weather balloon operations back in the 1910s and 1920s.  Many of these early test flights were actually carried out at Fort Omaha in Nebraska, just a few miles from where Weather Break is recorded on the campus of Creighton University.  On today’s episode of Weather Break, Dr. Jon Schrage takes a look back at this early work and its significance to modern meteorology.

Links:

This article by Meisinger was important in the writing of today’s episode of Weather Break.  You can find more of Meisinger’s interesting articles here.

Much of the information about Meisinger’s last balloon flight came from this journal article.  (If you would like a copy of this article and the security on the AMS’s website won’t let you have it, just contact us and we’ll be glad to send you a copy.)  You can also read more about Meisinger’s untimely end here.

Links:

For more information about Project Moby Dick, read Soldiers of Reason or Moby Dick Project, or visit ask.com, Wapedia, or Wikipedia.