Weather Blog
It's been an amazing week, which kicked off with thunderstorms and large hail last Friday, and then four wind storms Sunday night through Thursday. As you might imagine, the skies were dancing quite a bit with all the wind and rain, so I compiled some of the best time lapse videos of the week. Maybe find your iPod and crank up some tunes in your ear buds as you watch the days go by :) Per usual, these are from Dr. Dale Ireland in Silverdale and the UW Atmospheric Sciences Building. November 12: (Silverdale:)
November 13: (UW) November 17: Silverdale: UW: November 18: Silverdale: (Gorgeous Rainbow Alert!) UW: November 19 (UW): Have a great weekend!
Our army of reporters and photographers all have iPhones to get news stories and breaking news into our newsroom faster, but sometimes, Mother Nature wins. Take a look at this report Joe English and photographer Tom Agosti tried to file from a jetty overlooking on the viewing platform on the south jetty at the mouth of the Columbia River on Wednesday. Note to Apple -- the next version needs a boom mic! :)
While this is technically not weather related, a lot of people thing meteorologists deal with meteors, so this blog post will be right up their alley. According to Spaceweather.com, there was a spectacular fireball that streaked across the western states on Wednesday. Salt Lake City TV News site KSL.com says a fast-moving meteor lit up the night skies over most of Utah just after midnight Wednesday. Moments later, the phones lit up their switchboard as people across the state called to tell them what they saw and ask what it was. Professor David Kieda, chair of the University of Utah's astronomy department, told KSL.com the energy of the meteor coming into Earth's atmosphere was so powerful it has to be measured in Terawatts. "It's almost like the consumption of the United States all at once. It was a fraction of a second," Kieda said. Here is a collection of videos that came into the station:
If this sounds familiar, it might be because a similar event happened here over the Seattle area -- actually twice. Once on June 3, 2004, and again on Feb. 18, 2008.
The weather didn't cooperate around here for the Leonid Meteor shower early Monday morning, but I did get a request for some photos of it.
Here is a wonderful online gallery from Spaceweather.com.
Our resident photographer Jeff Fogg (of Issaquah) who is working at Antarctica's McMurdo Station continues to send some great photos from way down under.
Some scientists think they can use fractals to greatly improve weather predictions. Read more at NewsScientist.com. (Warning, it is pretty math intensive, for those who fear numbers :) )
Those of you out and about early Monday morning might have been treated to a spectacular sunrise that featured a nice optical display of a sun pillar.
WASHINGTON (AP) - The snows of Kilimanjaro may soon be gone.
The African mountain's white peak - made famous by writer Ernest Hemingway - is rapidly melting, researchers report. Some 85 percent of the ice that made up the mountaintop glaciers in 1912 was gone by 2007, researchers led by paleoclimatologist Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University report in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And more than a quarter of the ice present in 2000 was gone by 2007. If current conditions continue "the ice fields atop Kilimanjaro will not endure," the researchers said. Read more »
Maybe it's just Mother Nature getting in the Halloween spirit. A new video making the rounds on the Internet shows a spooky looking cloud over Romania: Read more »
This might look like some fancy print for an expensive couch or maybe the aftermath after your basketball got away from you and rolled across a bed of hot coals (because, we all keep those handy near playgrounds), but this is actually a photo of Mars.
More specifically, a part of Mars that has been dogged by their version of dust devils. Read more »
Just came across this today, even though the event was a few weeks ago, of a great satellite shot showing two typhoons in the Western Pacific near the Philippines. This is a composite satellite image -- one taken of Typhoon Parma at 10:35 a.m. on Oct. 7; the one of Typhoon Melor taken a few hours later but it shows the correct geography of where both storms were at that time. It's fairly rare to have to storms so close together, although I've seen it a few times with our fall and winter type storms here. You'd think they'd merge to form some sort of super storm, but actually, many times, the storms end up battling against each other for energy and can mess up the weather flow to keep them going. Other times, according to NASA you can get something called the Fujiwara Effect, where both storms will begin rotating around a center point. That's apparently a bit what happened in this case shown above, as the approach of Melor actually pulled Parma back out to sea a bit. You can find more about these storms and a higher resolution photo at NASA's Earth Observatory page.
WASHINGTON (AP) - The number of Americans who believe there is solid evidence the Earth is warming because of pollution is at its lowest point in three years, according to a survey released Thursday.
The poll of 1,500 adults by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that only 57 percent believe there is strong scientific evidence the Earth has gotten hotter over the past few decades, and as a result, people are viewing the situation as less serious. That's down from 77 percent in 2006, and 71 percent in April 2008. Read more »
To answer the title question -- not much. I know, this is a "weather blog" but this was just too mind-blowing to ignore... I was trawling around for blog topic ideas on one of my favorite sites, the Astronomy Picture of the Day and came across this that was posted earlier this month. The question is: Are the squares marked "A" and "B" the same color? Read more »
Issaquah's Jeff Fogg, who is working down at Antarctica's McMurdo Station, continues to capture some of the amazing beauty of the South Pole area. Here are some nighttime photos of the moon over the barren snow-capped landscape. It'll be an increasingly rare sight as they head toward summer and 24 hour daylight. Starting Oct. 23, the sun will rise at 2:08 a.m. local time and then stay above the horizon all winter long, not setting until 1:25 a.m. on Feb. 20th. But daylight changes rapidly -- around the equinoxes, the days get longer/shorter by a whopping 14 minutes a day -- or roughly an hour every four days. So much so that when they have their first sunset on Feb 20 it's only two months (April 24) until they are in 24 hour darkness, and the sun won't rise again on August 19th. Read more »
Here is time lapse video of one storm cell as it moved over Seattle durign the storms of Oct. 17, 2009, taken from our tower camera atop the Columbia Center building.
Chalk this up to perhaps "why did they think of that?" but a new concept phone gives you a pretty convincing display of what the weather will be. The phone's face, which is transparent, changes to a look of rain or fog or clear, depending on what it's doing outside. I think this device has already been invented. It's called a window :) Actually, I'd say if you have any cell phone with weather capability, you can achieve a similar effect: Read more »
NOAA has released their official long range forecast for the upcoming winter, and it holds no surprises: With a decent El Nino event forming in the Pacific Ocean, the overall theme of this winter is looking warmer and drier.
But that doesn't mean your shovels and skies will be collecting dust instead of snow -- it's still possible to get snow in El Nino years. Snow events tends to be weaker and less frequent, and mountain snowpacks on average run lower than normal in El Nino winters. Here is the full article by Associated Press writer Seth Borenstein: Read more »
A friend forwarded me this YouTube video of an extraterrestrial-looking cloud that was apparently filmed over Moscow late last week. Read more »
Monday marked the 47 year anniversary of the most devastating storm to strike the Pacific Northwest in the 20th Century. Aptly dubbed the "Columbus Day Storm", the storm struck with great fury on Oct. 12, 1962, pummeling many areas with well over 100 mph wind gusts and causing catastrophic damage -- mainly across Oregon, but Washington wasn't necessarily left off the hook. According to state climatologist Wolf Read, the storm caused between $230-280 million in damage (in 1962 dollars) across California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia, making it the worst natural disaster to strike the U.S. in that year. The storm formed from the remnants of typhoon Freda and reenergized off the California coast into a super storm. Some of the peak wind gusts were over 145 mph at Cape Blanco, Ore., 138 at Newport, 127 at Corvallis, 116 in Portland and 96 in Astoria. Even the Puget Sound area had some amazing gusts. Although Sea-Tac Airport had a paltry 58 mph peak gust (since topped by the 1993 Inauguration Day storm, and again by the Hanukkah Eve Storm of 2006 (I think that was 68 mph)), Renton reported a gust of 100, Bellingham had 98, Oak Harbor had 90 and Everett had 81 mph. While other wind storms have had stronger storm centers, this one stands alone in how it formed -- something Read says it could be another 100-1,000 years before we see a storm like it in our future. Read has done an excellent write up on the storm at climate.washington.edu. In fact, he's written up just about every wind storm to strike the Northwest. It's a great research site, and find more at climate.washington.edu/stormking More links on the Columbus Day Storm:
We all know how beautiful this area is, but that doesn't mean Mother Nature can't provide a reminder from time to time. Gwennivere Miller, Darrington:
NASA will send a used-up spacecraft slamming into the moon's south pole to kick up a massive plume of lunar dirt and then scour it to see if there's any water or ice spraying up. The idea is to confirm the theory that water - a key resource if people are going to go back to the moon - is hidden below the barren moonscape. Read more »
It can go down as Antarctica's prettiest mountain that doesn't actually exist.
Steve Vowell captured a sliver of what's called the "Green Flash" while in Newport last week.
In Thursday's weather blog, I highlighted some of the professional weather photographers on a national scale. How about giving some bigger props to the local folks? Although this first one is a hybrid. Jason Hammel from www.alpinestateofmind.com was in the blog yesterday, but just posted some new photos of a hike on Mount Olympus, where he spent a week. The top photo there is one of my new favorites, and this one below is a close second: Read more »
I admit -- I'm a sucker for awesome weather photography. I have probably 75 or 80 photos I keep in a folder to rotate through my computer desktop -- many submitted by local readers of our web site, but others I've found online.
I get them all the time from viewers and I'm sure you do too -- e-mails filled with incredible photos with even more incredible tales behind them. As you might suspect with randomly e-mailed items, a lot of these are either fake photos or perhaps real photos but wrong stories behind them. With the help of stellar Internet urban legend sleuth snopes.com, I'll show you some of the most popular e-mailed photos, and whether you should believe what you read. First up: Katrina tornadoes? (Main photo above) The e-mail comes with five or six ominously stunning photographs and says they were snapped in the Gulf Coast area as Hurricane Katrina approached in late August, 2005. False! Snopes.com says these are actual photos, but not of anything related to Hurricane Katrina. They are photos from various storms across the Midwest by storm chaser Mike Hollingshead. (Who, by the way, does stunning photography work. I'll be featuring him in a future blog.) Somehow, these got attributed as Katrina photographs. Snopes says these photos have also been erroneously attributed to Ontario tornados and tornadoes in Australia, among other things. Approaching storm clouds from (insert hurricane name here)!
False! Snopes says this is another multi-use photo that seems to get reused everytime a hurricane approaches. It's believed this photo is actually a shelf cloud from a tropical storm off the Australian coast in 2003. Read more » |
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Originally from Port Angeles and an Alum of Astoria High School, Scott graduated from the University of Washington in 1994 with a degree in Atmospheric Sciences and has been producing weather reports for broadcast and on the Web ever since.


