At this time of year, everyone wants to know what the upcoming winter is going to be like.  Good sources of information about seasonal forecasts like that include various government weather and climate agencies, private weather consulting firms, and academics.  A bad source of information about the upcoming winter would be woolly bear caterpillars.  For years legends have circulated about the ability of these little inserts to somehow predict the weather, although different versions of the story about HOW you are supposed to tell what the caterpillars think are out there.  Today on Weather Break, Dr. Jon Schrage takes a look at some of the early studies that supposedly “proved” that woolly bears are a good source of weather information, and he works to debunk this myth.

Links

For more information about woolly bear caterpillars, we recommend Ohio State University, backyardwildlifehabitat.com,  Weather Underground, or Wikipedia.

Here are the seasonal forecasts of the Climate Prediction Center–a much better source of information!

The recent change in the weather across Nebraska and South Dakota was brought about by a cold front and the cold Canadian air mass that was behind it.  This air mass was in northern Canada just a few days ago, and back then it had temperatures around -10 degrees F.  Obviously, over the course of the last few days, as that air mass has journeyed to our part of the country, big changes have happened in that air mass.  Meteorologists call that kind of change “air mass modification”–it’s a specific set of processes that change the temperature and moisture characteristics of an air mass once it has left the source region where it formed.  On today’s episode of Weather Break, we talk about air mass modification and how it’s a good thing that air masses change in this way, as it keeps the weather and climate of our part of the country from being more extreme than it already is.

Links

For more information about air masses, we recommend the University of Illinois, USA Today, Weather Questions, or Wikipedia.

For more information about air mass modification, we recommend Aerographer, the University of Wisconsin-Steven’s Point, or this article.

For reliable forecasts for wherever you are, we always recommend Unisys Weather.

“Water water everywhere nor any drop to drink” complained a group of sailors stranded at sea in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner”.  In the poem, the sailors had run out of fresh drinking water, and so despite being surrounded by water, they were dying of thirst.  That’s, of course, because sea water is salty–far too salty to be drinkable.  Interestingly, however, from the point of view of the atmosphere, there really isn’t any difference between fresh water and sea water.  All of the important ways in which the atmosphere and bodies of water interact work the same for freshwater lakes and inland seas as they do for the open ocean.  On today’s episode of Weather Break, we take a look at some of the roles saltwater plays in the atmosphere.

Links

For the full text of the “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner”, click here.

For more information about the topics of haze and aerosols in the atmosphere, we recommend these past episodes of Weather Break:

• The Differences between Haze and Fog
• Global Dimming

Yesterday we talked about the ways that one can get fresh, clean drinking water directly from the atmosphere through the process known as harvesting dew.  This can be a reliable, eco-friendly way to get small quantities of water, but you aren’t going to be able to fill a pool or flush a toilet using just dew.  To produce larger quantities of fresh water, harvesting fog is a better solution.  In fact, there are a number of villages and small towns in Chile where this has become an important source of their water.  Believe it or not, there really are a number of regions of the world where the climate is sufficiently dry that there is no surface water (like rivers) but where fog is common enough that a technology like fog harvesting is useful, productive, and reliable.  On today’s episode of Weather Break, we talk about fog harvesting and when and where this is a good strategy for ensuring access to clean water.

LINKS

For more information about harvesting dew and fog, we recommend the Organization of American States (link 1 and 2), scienceinafrica.com, Time Magazine, Thaindian, inhabitat.com, treehugger.com, or this article.

Everyone knows that we all need to work to conserve fresh water resources.  However, in some parts of the world, access to fresh, clean water is far more limited than what we are accustomed to in the United States.  There is an increased interest in recent years in the technology behind harvesting dew as a source of drinking water.  Obviously, the applications for techniques like these are somewhat limited–you aren’t going to be able to get enough water by harvesting dew from the atmosphere to, say, irrigate a field of corn.  But if all you need is a small quantity of water–maybe the drinking needs of a family, for example–dew collecting can be a reliable and cheap solution.  On today’s episode of Weather Break, Dr. Jon Schrage takes a look at what can be done to extract humidity from the atmosphere.

Links

For more information about harvesting dew and fog, we recommend the Organization of American States (link 1 and 2), scienceinafrica.com, Time Magazine, Thaindian, inhabitat.com, treehugger.com, or this article.

Recently, the staff of Weather Break has been talking a lot about the Bible story of Noah’s Ark.  We’re not theologians or bible historians–we’re thinking about the story from the angle of weather and climate.  In particular, the story brings up a lot of meteorology questions.  For example, is it really possible for it to rain all over the world–much less for 40 days and 40 nights?  And just how deep would the flood waters be after that much rain?  None of this is meant to cast doubt on the Bible story–it’s the nature of miracles that they don’t have to make sense in a physical way.  Rather, on today’s episode of Weather Break, we’re using the story of Noah and the Great Flood to learn more about the atmosphere works in our world.

Links

For the full text of the Book of Genesis, click here.

Some of these cartoons about Noah’s Ark are pretty funny, actually.

It’s hard enough for a scientist to make one really great, world-changing discovery in the course of his or her career–most scientists probably never accomplish that.  German meteorologist Alfred Wegener, however, is credited with two such discoveries.  Students in the Atmospheric Sciences know that he was one of the co-discoverers of the so-called “Bergeron Process”, which is a key aspect of the explanation about how precipitation forms in clouds.  Strangely, Wegener is also the researcher who first suggested the theory that is today known as “plate tectonics” or “continental drift”.  On today’s episode of Weather Break, we take a look at the productive life and strange death of one of the great figures in the history of the Earth Sciences.

Links:

For more information about the life and work of Alfred Wegener, consult the USGS, PBS, berkeley.edu, pangaea.org, or Wikipedia.

Click here for more information about the Alfred-Wegener-Institute.

In one form or another, the National Weather Service has been around for over 135 years now.  Originally part of the War Department’s Signal Corps, the first meteorologists of the NWS issued their first forecast on November 1, 1870.   When you read the forecast, it doesn’t sound much like the forecasts that you see on TV or hear on the radio today, which just goes to show how many changes have been made in the technology of weather forecasting and in the art of communicating forecasts.  On today’s episode of Weather Break, we take a look at the first forecast ever issued by the fledgling Weather Service to see what we can learn from this early attempt at weather prediction.

Links

For more information about the history of the National Weather Service, click here.

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 Bridge.  You’ve undoubtedly seen the footage taken from when that bridge fell.  On today’s episode of Weather Break, we talk about how the winds led to the failure of this bridge just months after it opened.

Links:

For a nice video about the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, click here, or any of these links.

For a broad overview of the story of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, click here.

Today is the anniversary of the so-called “White Hurricane of 1913″, also known (perhaps more accurately) as the “Great Lakes Storm”.  This was a particularly dramatic example of a midlatitude cyclone, bringing heavy snow and strong winds to the upper-Midwest.  Over 250 people are known to have died in the storm, with more than half of these deaths being drownings when ships on the Great Lakes capsized.  On today’s episode of Weather Break, Dr. Jon Schrage of the Creighton University Department of Atmospheric Sciences talks about what makes this particular storm so special.

Links:

For more information about the “White Hurricane of 1913″, check out the National Weather Service, the Toronto Star, nowpublic.com, or Wikipedia.