Stormgasm
Semi-important events that are semi-relevant to meteorology: November 13
1901 - 1901 Caister Lifeboat Disaster happens. What would become known as the Great Storm resulted in 9 deaths out of a 12 person crew.
1970 - The Bhola cyclone hits Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) killing around 500,000 people. The cyclone had wind speeds of 150 mph and is regarded as one of the worst natural disasters of the 20th century.
2010 - American astronomer Allan Sandage dies. He is best known for determining the Hubble constant and the age of the universe (reasonably accurate values for each).
Semi-important events that are semi-relevant to meteorology: September 19
1710 - The Danish astronomer Ole Rømer dies. In 1676, he made the first quantitative measurements of the speed of light. He estimated that light moved at 220,000 km/s, which is about 26% lower than the true value of 300,000 km/s.
1843 - Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis dies. He did research in energy transfer in rotating systems. Although he did not coin the name the Coriolis Effect nor did he do research in atmospheric sciences or any other earth science, his research would help to give rise to what we know as the Coriolis Effect.
1985 - A magnitude 8.3 earthquake hits Mexico City. Casualties range anywhere from 10,000 to 40,000 people dead.
Clear Sky Chart →
This is a great tool for both meteorology and astronomy. It is a sky cover chart that forecasts the cloud cover over the next few couple of days. Although it starts out in Canada (which is great for my followers from Canada), if you scroll down, there are other locations including the United States. Check it out!
Semi-important events that are semi-relevant to meteorology: August 22
1949 - Queen Charlotte Islands earthquake strikes the Queen Charlotte Islands. It was an 8.1 magnitude earthquake that was the largest earthquake recorded by seismometers in Canada.
1950 - Geologist Kirk Bryan dies. He taught at Harvard until his death.
1989 - the first of Neptune’s rings is discovered.
Meteor Shower Sounds Captured by Space Radar
The U.S. Air Force Space Surveillance Radar in Texas recorded echoes of the Perseid Meteors as they passed over the monitoring facility. Includes imagery of a meteor photographed by astronaut Ron Garan aboard the International Space Station.
(Source: youtube.com, via skeptv)
Space Weather - Impact on Life on Earth (and in Space)
Just as Earth weather can do damage to homes and other property and disrupt our lives, Space Weather can cause damage to satellites, and affect our communications, navigation, and power systems, disrupting our lives. Therefore, studying space weather is important to our national economy because solar storms can affect the advanced technology we have become so dependent upon in our everyday lives.
This could have a major economical impact.
- Cost of a major power blackout: $4-10B (billion dollars)- An extreme solar storm (like the one from 1859): $1-2T (trillion dollars)- January 1994; the outage of two Canadian telecommunication satellites took 6 months to recovery and the cost was $50-70M (million dollars).
Scientists around the world use data from spacecraft and ground-based instruments to monitor space weather patterns - magnetospheric storms and substorms - in hopes of one day being able to predict space weather. If we knew two days earlier that a large space storm was headed our way, we could close down any satellite in the path of the storm and give them better protection from the radiation, reduce the power output of large electrical power companies on Earth and be able to protect some of their expensive power grid components.
Source: NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory.
