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Tag: weather

  • Lightning can make energy waves that travel shockingly far into space

    Lightning can make energy waves that travel shockingly far into space

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    Lightning can produce special waves of energy

    RooM the Agency/Alamy

    An overlooked mechanism lets energy from lightning reach the highest layers of the atmosphere, where it could threaten the safety of satellites and astronauts.

    When lightning occurs, the energy it carries sometimes gives rise to special electromagnetic waves called whistlers, so named because they can be converted to sound signals. For decades, researchers thought lightning-induced whistlers would remain trapped relatively close to Earth’s surface, below about 1000 kilometres.

    Now Vikas Sonwalkar and Amani Reddy at the University of Alaska Fairbanks have discovered that some whistlers can bounce off a layer of the atmosphere called the ionosphere, which is filled with charged particles. This enables the waves, and the energy they carry, to reach distances up to 20,000 kilometres above the planet’s surface. That means they can travel deep into the magnetosphere, the region of space dominated by Earth’s magnetic field.

    The researchers found evidence of these reflected whistlers in data from the Van Allen Probes, twin robotic spacecraft that measured the magnetosphere between 2012 and 2019. They also saw signatures of this phenomenon in studies published as early as the 1960s. Old and new data all suggest that it is very frequent and happening constantly, says Reddy.

    In fact, lightning could be contributing twice as much energy to this area of space as previous estimates indicated, the team says. And this energy charges and accelerates nearby particles, producing electromagnetic radiation that can damage satellites and harm the health of astronauts.

    “Lightning was always believed to be a little bit of a smaller player. We haven’t had this data until a decade ago, and we have certainly not been looking at it with this great level of detail,” says Jacob Bortnik at the University of California, Los Angeles. The new work extends an invitation to other researchers to develop a more accurate picture of the magnetosphere, he says.

    Establishing the link between lightning and the magnetosphere is also important because changes in Earth’s climate may be making lightning-heavy storms more common, says Sonwalkar.

    The team now wants to analyse data from more satellites. It hopes to learn more about how lightning-based whistlers populate the magnetosphere, and how they may be affected by space weather.

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  • The Antarctic’s polar vortex could be about to split in two

    The Antarctic’s polar vortex could be about to split in two

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    A satellite view of Antarctica

    Science History Images / Alamy

    Antarctica’s polar vortex could be about to split in two for the first time in more than 20 years after a series of sudden spikes in stratospheric temperatures. If that happens, it could lead to significant warming in Antarctica and an unusually hot summer in Australia and South America.

    The southern polar vortex is a clockwise swirl of winds that trap a cold air current above Antarctica during the southern hemisphere winter. The vortex is usually very stable at this time of year, with temperatures inside its core in…

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  • To Study Tornados, Bring an Apocalypse-Proof Truck. And Rocket Launchers

    To Study Tornados, Bring an Apocalypse-Proof Truck. And Rocket Launchers

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    Reed Timmer has been chasing storms for more than two decades, since he intercepted his first tornado in northern Oklahoma as an undergrad majoring in meteorology. During that time, Timmer, who typically logs more than 50,000 miles on the road each year, has intercepted countless tornadoes, each one helping to further his extreme-weather knowledge. “We still don’t completely know what happens inside a tornado,” says Edgar ONeal, a weather journalist who is Timmer’s chase partner.

    Enter the Dominator. This is the third iteration of Timmer’s custom-built tornado mobile, which he initially rolled out in the late 2000s. The current Dominator has the chassis of an F350 and weighs 10,000 pounds, enabling it to withstand the debris, gorilla hail, and 150-mph winds that accompany the most powerful of storms. According to Timmer, his “holy grail” is to drive the Dominator to within a quarter-mile of a twister, then shoot a rocket loaded with sensors directly into the heart of the tornado. Timmer has accomplished this once: In May 2019, the rocket tracked the vortex’s pressure drop and frigid air temperature. His team’s hope in the coming year is to launch dozens of rockets at the same time into the swirling updraft of a twister’s “inflow notch.” But even if all those rockets fail, the Dominator is full of its own sensors to capture valuable scientific data. “That’s the whole point,” says ONeal. “You can launch probes into a tornado, or you can be the probe, and that’s the Dominator.”

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  • Everything’s About to Get a Hell of a Lot More Expensive Due to Climate Change

    Everything’s About to Get a Hell of a Lot More Expensive Due to Climate Change

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    Agricultural yields for important commodities produced in those states (fruits, nuts, corn, sugar, veggies, wheat) are withering, thanks to punishing heat and soil-nutrition depletion. The supply chains through which these products usually travel are thrown off course at varying points, by storms that disrupt land and sea transportation. Preparation for these varying externalities requires supply-chain middlemen and product sellers to anticipate consequential cost increases down the line—and implement them sooner than later, in order to cover their margins.

    You may have noticed some clear standouts among the contributors to May’s inflation: juices and frozen drinks (19.5 percent), along with sugar and related substitutes (6.4 percent). It’s probably not a coincidence that Florida, a significant producer of both oranges and sugar, has seen extensive damage to those exports thanks to extreme weather patterns caused by climate change as well as invasive crop diseases. Economists expect that orange juice prices will stay elevated during this hot, rainy summer.

    (Incidentally, climate effects may also be influencing the current trajectory and spread of bird flu across American livestock—and you already know what that means for meat and milk prices.)

    It goes beyond groceries, though. It applies to every basic building block of modern life: labor, immigration, travel, and materials for homebuilding, transportation, power generation, and necessary appliances. Climate effects have been disrupting and raising the prices of timber, copper, and rubber; even chocolate prices were skyrocketing not long ago, thanks to climate change impacts on African cocoa bean crops. The outdoor workers supplying such necessities are experiencing adverse health impacts from the brutal weather, and the recent record-breaking influxes of migrants from vulnerable countries—which, overall, have been good for the U.S. economy—are in part a response to climate damages in their home nations.

    The climate price hikes show up in other ways as well. There’s a lot of housing near the coasts, in the Gulf regions and Northeast specifically; Americans love their beaches and their big houses. Turns out, even with generous (very generous) monetary backstops from the federal government, it’s expensive to build such elaborate manors and keep having to rebuild them when increasingly intense and frequent storms hit—which is why private insurers don’t want to keep having to deal with that anymore, and the costs are handed off to taxpayers.

    When all the economic indicators that take highest priority in Americans’ heads are in such volatile motion thanks to climate change, it may be time to reconsider how traditional economics work and how we perceive their effects. It’s no longer a time when extreme weather was rarer and more predictable; its force and reasoning aren’t beyond our capacity to aptly monitor, but they’re certainly more difficult to track. You can’t stretch out the easiest economic model to fix that. And you can’t keep ignoring the clear links between our current weather hellscape, climate change, and our everyday goods.

    Thankfully, some actors are finally, belatedly taking a new approach. The reinsurance company Swiss Re has acknowledged that its industry fails to aptly factor disaster and climate risks into its calculations, and is working to overhaul its equations. Advances in artificial intelligence, energy-intensive though they may be, are helping to improve extreme-weather predictions and risk forecasts. At the state level, insurers are pushing back against local policies that bafflingly forbid them from pricing climate risks into their models, and Florida has new legislation requiring more transparency in the housing market around regional flooding histories. New York legislators are attempting to ban insurers from backstopping the very fossil-fuel industry that’s contributed to so much of their ongoing crisis.

    After all, we’re no longer in a world where climate change affects the economy, or where voters prioritizing economic or inflationary concerns are responding to something distinct from climate change—we’re in a world where climate change is the economy.

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  • The End of El Niño Might Make the Weather Even More Extreme

    The End of El Niño Might Make the Weather Even More Extreme

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    Since the World Meteorological Organization declared the start of the current El Niño on July 4, 2023, it’s been almost a year straight of record-breaking temperatures. According to the National Centers for Environmental Information, there’s a 61 percent chance that this year could be even hotter than the last, spelling danger for areas prone to deadly heat waves during the summer months. An estimated 2,300 people in the US died due to heat-related illnesses in 2023, and researchers say the real number is probably higher.

    All this heat has also settled into the oceans, creating more than a year of superhot surface temperatures and bleaching more than half of the planet’s coral reefs. It also provides potential fuel for hurricanes, which form as energy is sucked up vertically into the atmosphere. Normally, trade winds scatter heat and humidity across the water’s surface and prevent these forces from building up in one place. But during La Niña, cooler temperatures in the Pacific Ocean weaken high-altitude winds in the Atlantic that would normally break up storms, allowing hurricanes to more readily form.

    “When that pattern in the Pacific sets up, it changes wind patterns around the world,” said Matthew Rosencrans, a lead forecaster at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center. “When it’s strong, it can be the dominant signal on the entire planet.”

    This year’s forecast is especially dangerous, as a likely swift midsummer transition to La Niña could combine with all that simmering ocean water. NOAA forecasters expect these conditions to brew at least 17 storms big enough to get a name, roughly half of which could be hurricanes. Even a hurricane with relatively low wind speeds can dump enough water to cause catastrophic flooding hundreds of miles inland.

    “It’s important to think of climate change as making things worse,” said Andrew Dessler, climate scientist at Texas A&M University. Although human-caused warming won’t directly increase the frequency of hurricanes, he said, it can make them more destructive. “It’s a question of how much worse it’s going to get,” he said.

    Over the past 10 months, El Niño helped create blistering temperatures in some parts of the United States, drying out the land. Drought-stricken areas are more vulnerable to severe flooding, as periods without precipitation mean rainfall is likely to be more intense when it finally arrives, and soils may be too dry to soak up water. As desiccated land and soaring temperatures dry out vegetation, the stage is set for wildfires.

    While the National Interagency Fire Center expects lower-than-average odds of a big blaze in California this year, in part due to El Niño bringing unusually high rainfall to the state, other places may not be so lucky. The agency’s seasonal wildfire risk map highlights Hawaii, which suffered the country’s deadliest inferno partly as a result of a persistent drought in Maui last August. Canada, which also experienced its worst fire season last summer, could be in for more trouble following its warmest-ever winter. This May, smoke from hundreds of wildfires in Alberta and British Columbia had already begun to seep across the Canadian border into Midwestern states.

    “We are exiting the climate of the 20th century, and we’re entering a new climate of the 21st century,” Dessler said. Unfortunately, our cities were built for a range of temperatures and weather conditions that don’t exist anymore.

    To get ready for hurricanes, Rosencrans said people who live in states along the Gulf Coast and Atlantic Ocean should go to government disaster preparedness websites to find disaster kit checklists and advice about forming an emergency plan. “Thinking about it now, rather than when the storm is bearing down on you, is going to save you a ton of time, energy, and stress,” he said.

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  • Wildfire smoke: Is North America set for another bad wildfire smoke season?

    Wildfire smoke: Is North America set for another bad wildfire smoke season?

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    Mandatory Credit: Photo by Canadian Press/Shutterstock (14481302b) A wildfire burns in northern Manitoba near near Flin Flon, as seen from a helicopter surveying the situation, Tuesday, May 14, 2024. Mba-Wildfire, Flin Flon, Canada - 14 May 2024

    A wildfire burns in northern Manitoba, Canada, on 14 May 2024

    Canadian Press/Shutterstock

    The North American wildfire season is off to an active start: in May, large wildfires in western Canada prompted evacuations and sent smoke drifting through the atmosphere over the US Midwest, temporarily giving the region the country’s worst air quality. This past week, smoke from wildfires in Mexico was blowing north, worsening air pollution in the US Southeast.

    Here is what we could expect for the wildfire season ahead.

    Will this year’s wildfire season be as bad as 2023?…

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  • The Auroras Should Be Spectacular This Summer, Thanks to Solar Maximum

    The Auroras Should Be Spectacular This Summer, Thanks to Solar Maximum

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    Auroras filled much of the world’s skies for several nights in mid-May as a historic geomagnetic storm coursed 100 kilometers above our heads. Being able to see auroras so deep into the tropics was possibly a once-in-a-lifetime experience, but there will almost certainly be more strong geomagnetic storms later this year, giving hope to aurora watchers around the world that more dazzling lights are possible in the near future.

    This is because we’re quickly approaching solar maximum, the peak of our star’s predictable 11-year cycle of activity. Solar flares and coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, are more common during and just after solar maximum, and it’s these that are responsible for vivid auroras.

    The great aurora show on May 10, 2024, was the result of three CMEs that surged out of the sun’s outer atmosphere and headed toward Earth. A CME is a collection of magnetized plasma ejected from the sun’s exceptionally hot outer atmospheric layer, the corona, as a result of a disruption in the sun’s magnetic field.

    On May 10, each successive CME moved a little faster than the one before it, allowing all three bursts of charged particles to merge before washing over Earth’s atmosphere. The combined energy of three CMEs hitting our planet at once unleashed an aurora show for the ages.

    Image may contain Egg Food Astronomy Outer Space and Planet

    AR3664 on May 10, 2024.Photograph: NASA/SOHO

    These CMEs were associated with Active Region 3664, a collection of relatively cold and dark sunspots on the sun’s surface that grew more than 15 times larger than the Earth itself. You could see AR3664 without magnification simply by peeking up at the sun through a pair of eclipse glasses.

    It turns out that the enormity of AR3664 was a major contributor to our generational aurora display. Such spots on the solar surface often disrupt the region’s magnetic field, creating an instability and realignment that can force the release of a CME or even a powerful solar flare—a burst of electromagnetic radiation that can cause radio blackouts.

    The surface of the sun rotates every three and a half weeks or so, meaning that sunspots are only visible to Earth for a week or two, depending on where they form on the solar surface.



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  • The Northern Lights Could Be Visible Across the US Thanks to a Rare Solar Storm

    The Northern Lights Could Be Visible Across the US Thanks to a Rare Solar Storm

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    Three rapid bursts of charged particles that erupted toward Earth from the Sun’s burning hot outer atmosphere on Wednesday could lead to stunning auroras across a wide swath of the US and a colorful hue as far south as Florida to start the weekend.

    Traveling at more than one-and-a-half million miles per hour, the trio of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) have merged into one pulse of plasma and magnetic field during the 60-hour trip from the Sun’s atmosphere toward our own.

    Tracking these developments, experts at NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) issued a “severe geomagnetic storm watch” in advance of its arrival. This was the first such alert issued by the agency in nearly 20 years.

    Visible auroras are possible across much of the United States as a result of this expected storm. An event of this magnitude is also likely to cause disruptions to radios, satellites, and possibly even some power grids, though nothing most people should be concerned about.

    This weekend’s aurora potential started with a sunspot more than 10 times larger than Earth. It’s a sunspot so large, in fact, that it’s visible to the unmagnified eye through a leftover pair of eclipse glasses.

    Solar flares and CMEs are often associated with sunspots. Larger and more intense spots can lead to more frequent and more intense releases of matter from the Sun’s atmosphere.

    Satellites dedicated to tracking solar activity detected the first CME rushing out of the Sun’s corona around 9:00 a.m. EDT on Wednesday, May 8. A second, smaller CME erupted from the same region a few hours later, followed by another burst of charged matter about eight hours after that.

    All three CMEs erupted with different intensities and speeds. The first CME was the largest and slowest of the trio, which allowed the second, faster CME to collide and merge into the first. The third CME of the bunch would eventually catch up as well, allowing all three surges of charged particles to reach Earth in a single wave about 60 hours after ejecting from the Sun.

    The combined intensity of the three CMEs washing over Earth’s atmosphere at once is the driving force behind the severe geomagnetic storm.

    If everything stays on track, a memorable series of auroras could grace the skies over much of the United States during the overnight hours Friday into early Saturday morning.

    The timing of the event places the likely peak disruption in the middle of the night across the US, providing a great viewing opportunity for most of the country if the event remains on course.

    A geomagnetic storm of this intensity could make the aurora visible overhead from Seattle to Chicago to New York and Washington, DC, with auroras possible as far south as Oklahoma City and Raleigh. Colors may be visible on the northern horizon as far south as northern Florida.

    Folks across Europe and Asia may also see the auroras if the storm arrives during their nighttime hours. During the peak of an event of this magnitude, the northern lights could dance overhead around London, Paris, Berlin, and Moscow.



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  • Ambient Weather WS-5000 Review: A Fantastic Weather Station

    Ambient Weather WS-5000 Review: A Fantastic Weather Station

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    I now have a moisture sensor in my garden bed that tells me how dry my soil is, which is an awesome way to know I need to turn on my remote sprinklers while on vacation. An air quality monitor inside my workspace tells me temperature and humidity (important to monitor for some of my acoustic guitars), and another monitor really made me open the window when cooking indoors. All of these things are trivially combined by the system and displayed alongside my other metrics on the Ambient Weather dashboard. It’s the easiest thing to set up ever.

    Ambient Weather recently added a better digital display that you can buy aftermarket. As I said, the one that comes with the unit is a bit retro-chic, requiring you to use physical buttons to input logins and passwords, and with only a few selectable layouts. The new Weather Window, as the brand calls it, is much larger and more modern-feeling, and it does include touchscreen controls and variable layouts, but it’s still not as fantastic as it could be.

    Small screen in a picture frame displaying weather information

    Photograph: Parker Hall

    I wish there was a way to show the weekly weather forecast on the main screen, instead of having to tap the display to see that, among other UI niggles. I do like that the Weather Window comes with a frame-like edge, which makes placing it where you might place a family photo, or hanging it on the wall, particularly easy.

    By the Numbers

    Most of us don’t need such minutiae in our lives, and that’s fine. For the person who wakes up and plans their whole day based on the temperature and precipitation, or who constantly checks weather radar and talks about it, the Ambient Weather system is the closest we will come to reaching nirvana on Earth.

    That might not be you, but it is almost certainly someone you know. I love being away from home and knowing how wet the soil in my garden is, that my house temp and humidity are correct. I like seeing when the sun and moon are going to rise and set at a glance, and knowing how many inches of rain, at a spot above my head, we have gotten in rainy north Portland. Every time my dad and I get together, if we’re not talking about Formula One or the local soccer team’s current woes, we’re talking about what our stations are telling us.

    If learning the micro-trends of your yard and chatting, meaningfully, about the weather to friends, relatives, and strangers is your kind of thing, then an Ambient Weather system, really any of them, is probably a fun thing for you to check out. You might even find it useful.

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  • Get Ready for Monster Hurricanes This Summer

    Get Ready for Monster Hurricanes This Summer

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    Three main factors converge to intensify hurricanes. The first is that as the world in general warms, so too do the oceans. Water evaporating off the surface rises, releasing heat that fuels the developing hurricane. The warmer a patch of ocean water is, the more energy a cyclone has to exploit. If a hurricane like Lee forms off the coast of Africa, it’s got a lot of Atlantic ocean to feed on as it moves toward the East Coast of the United States. As we approach this year’s hurricane season, tropical Atlantic temperatures remain very high.

    The second factor is humidity. As the atmosphere warms, it can hold more water vapor, so some parts of the world are getting more humid. Hurricanes love that, as drier air can lead to cooling and downdrafts that counteract the updrafts that drive the storm. “So long as it remains moist, the storm can strengthen, or maintain its intensity,” says Balaguru. “However, once the core enters into a dry environment or becomes less moist, then the storm will start weakening.”

    And lastly, hurricanes hate wind shear, or winds of different speeds and directions at different altitudes. (Think of it like layers of a cake, only made of air.) Instead, cyclones like a stable atmosphere, which allows their winds to get swirling and intensifying. Wind shear can also inject drier air from outside the storm into the core of the hurricane, further weakening it. As the world warms, wind shear is decreasing along the US East Coast and East and South Asia, providing the ideal atmospheric conditions for cyclones to form and intensify. “Under climate change, the upper troposphere is expected to warm up at a higher pace than the surface,” says Balaguru. “This can enhance the stability of the atmosphere and also weaken the circulation in the tropics.”

    Nearer term, La Niña conditions in the Pacific could help form and intensify hurricanes this summer. Even though La Niña’s in a different ocean, it tends to suppress winds over the Atlantic, meaning there’s less of the wind shear that hurricanes hate. Hence the University of Arizona’s prediction for an extremely active hurricane season, combined with very high sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic to fuel the storms. By contrast, last year’s El Niño created wind conditions in the Atlantic that discouraged the formation of cyclones.

    Even then, Hurricane Lee developed into a monster storm last September. A week before that, Hurricane Idalia rapidly intensified just before slamming into Florida. That sort of intensification close to shore is extraordinarily dangerous. “When the storm is very close to the coast—let’s say it’s a day or two out—if it then suddenly intensifies rapidly, then it can throw you off guard in terms of preparations,” says Balaguru. A town may have planned its evacuations expecting winds of 100 mph, and suddenly it’s more like 130 mph.

    Unfortunately, Balaguru’s new study finds that climatic conditions, particularly near the coast, are becoming more conducive for storm intensification. It’s up to teams like Zeng’s at the University of Arizona to further hone their forecasts to manage that growing risk to coastal populations. “For scientists, seasonal forecasting is a reality check of our understanding,” says Zeng. “We have done pretty well over the past few years, and it’s going to give us more confidence.”

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