Weather Break

Click here to listen to episode 530 of Weather Break.
Earlier this month, you might have seen the stories on the news about all of the wildfires in southern California. Thousands had to flee as the flame burned many homes. Stories like these about fires in California seem to come around every year, but [...]

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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 episode 528 of Weather Break.
Yesterday on Weather Break, we talked about the 150th anniversary of the discovery of the greenhouse effect. As much as global warming and the greenhouse effect are debated in the news these days, it’s hard to believe that actually we’ve understood the basics of how [...]

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Click here to listen to episode 527 of Weather Break.
Just last week, President Obama and the leaders of most of the world’s largest car companies announced that they had reached an agreement on increasing the fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks sold in the United States. Increasing fuel efficiency standards serves two important [...]

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Click here to listen to episode 526 of Weather Break.
Three-hundred and twenty three years ago last week, Daniel Fahrenheit was born in part of what is today Poland.  You and I are familiar with the name “Fahrenheit”, of course, because of the well-known “Fahrenheit temperature scale”, which remains the main way to describe temperatures in [...]

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