Weather Break

Click here to listen to episode 570 of Weather Break.
Your local TV meteorology probably tells you the humidity each night on the news in terms of the so-called “relative humidity”, but a much more useful number is the “dewpoint temperature”.  This measure of humidity tells us the temperature to which air would need to be [...]

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Click here to listen to episode 569 of Weather Break.
O’Neill, Nebraska was the site of the 1953 “Great Plains Field Turbulence Project”, which also came to be known as “The O’Neill Experiment”.  This was one of the most important weather experiments in meteorological history; it truly forms the basis of much of what scientists know [...]

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Click here to listen to episode 568 of Weather Break.
From leprechauns to unicorns to Dorothy to Kermit the Frog, pop culture is full of references to characters that are looking for something “over the rainbow” or “at the rainbow’s end” or whatever.  However, what you and I perceive as a rainbow is really a bit [...]

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Click here to listen to episode 567 of Weather Break.
There are several competing processes at work inside of a rain clouds.  Raindrops are growing by colliding with each other and sticking together, but drops are also breaking up, producing more, smaller drops.  Depending exactly on which process is happening faster, the overall size of drops [...]

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Click here to listen to episode 566 of Weather Break.
In our part of the world, summer is clearly the warm season and winter is the cold season, but that’s not really the way it works in other parts of the world.  For example, in much of the tropics, the temperature doesn’t really change all that [...]

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