KATU - Blogs - Weather

Dude! The sunrise this morning was totally tubular!

Snow cap disappearing from Mount Kilimanjaro

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.

Strange, and not so strange, clouds return to skies

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:

Mars has tattoos?

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.

That's one angry ocean

Poll: Americans' belief in global warming cools

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.

What does this illusion have to do with weather?

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?

More great photos from (way) down under

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.

Incredible video of storm as it strikes Queen Anne Hill

You make a better phone than a window

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.

According to the blog DesignCrave.com, "The Window Phone designed by Seunghan Song provides a sleek glass interface that changes to reflect the weather conditions outside."

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: