Weather Break

Click here to listen to this episode of Weather Break.
For the last few days, we’ve been talking about the use of weather balloons in meteorology.  Modern weather balloons are designed to rise rapidly until the balloon itself pops and the whole apparatus falls back to the surface of the Earth within an hour of launch. [...]

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Click here to listen to this episode 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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Click here to listen to this episode of Weather Break.
All this week on Weather Break, we’re going to be talking about weather balloons.  The kinds of weather balloons that the National Weather Service uses are designed to rise rapidly through the atmosphere, taking measurements of the temperature, pressure, humidity and winds as they go.  Within [...]

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Click here to listen to episode 695 of Weather Break.
It’s hard to get a sense of the size of clouds, since they are pretty much always out of reach and there aren’t usually other objects nearby for scale.  However, there are a couple of tricks of the trade and tips for figuring out how big [...]

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Click here to listen to episode 694 of Weather Break.
Cumulus clouds have a specific shape that we are all familiar with, even if we’ve never really thought about it–they are flat on the bottom and lumpy on the top.  Yesterday, we talked about the fairly technical reasons why they are lumpy on the top, so [...]

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