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Monthly Archives: November 2015
Can it be too cold to snow?
No, it is never too cold to snow.
It snows in Antarctica — where temperatures are minus 70 degrees — though only a few tenths of an inch.
To get snow, the always-present water vapor in the atmosphere has to be converted to ice crystals. How much water vapor is in the atmosphere depends on the air temperature. Continue reading
How do we measure an official snowfall for Madison?
Accurate and precise measurement of snow accumulation is a difficult task.
The measurement tools are simple: a ruler or yardstick that measures in inches and tenths of an inch. Continue reading
What forces a mid-latitude cyclone to develop?
Our storm on Wednesday night and Thursday of last week was the first strong storm of the autumn/winter season. As you found yourself caught in the strong winds, you may well have wondered how do storms like this one come to be.
That has been the central motivating question in meteorological science for most of the past 100 years. Continue reading
How unusual was the rapid intensification of Hurricane Patricia?
The recent extremely powerful Hurricane Patricia off the west coast of Mexico, the most intense hurricane ever measured in the Western Hemisphere, was noteworthy for a number of reasons.
Perhaps primarily, it was characterized by the incredible fact that its central minimum pressure decreased by 100 millibars in 24 hours from Oct. 22-23. Since the average sea-level pressure is just over 1,000 millibars, that means that 10 percent of the atmospheric column over the center of Patricia was somehow evacuated in only one day. Continue reading
Category: Tropical, Weather Dangers
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Will this mild November weather continue?
Not necessarily. Some warm Novembers had some severe extratropical cyclones, particularly around Veteran’s Day (formally known as Armistice Day).
Tuesday marks the 40th year since a winter storm blew across the Midwest, sending the freighter SS Edmund Fitzgerald to the bottom of Lake Superior with all 29 crew members. Gordon Lightfoot’s 1976 ballad “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” helped make this incident the most famous disaster in Great Lakes shipping history. Continue reading
Category: Meteorology, Severe Weather, Weather Dangers
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