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Monthly Archives: September 2024
Do oceans have heat waves?
As with the atmosphere, oceans can experience heat waves. The National Weather Service defines an atmospheric heat wave as a period of abnormally hot weather generally lasting more than two days. To be considered a heat wave, the temperatures must be outside the historical averages for a given area.
Marine heat waves are defined as any time the ocean temperatures are warmer than 90% of the previous observations for the region at a given time of year. Marine heat waves can last for weeks, months and even years. Continue reading
Is the Sun Playing a Role in the Earth’s Global Warming?
The sun helps maintain Earth’s climate to be warm enough for us to survive. Even subtle changes in Earth’s orbit around the sun have led to and ended past ice ages. This relationship between Earth’s climate and its orbit around the Sun is well known.
The sun’s activity and appearance goes though cycles, with one solar cycle taking 11 years to complete. The current cycle began at the end of 2019 and will reach peak levels of activity in 2025. During a solar cycle, the amount of solar radiation reaching Earth varies. These changes have a variety of effects on Earth’s atmosphere, including auroras. Continue reading
How can the Upper Midwest get such high dew points every year?
The dew point temperature is a measure of the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere and is also a good way to tell how uncomfortable you might feel on a hot day. Hot days and high water vapor contents are a serious health risk for some. Also, high water vapor content is a key fuel for severe thunderstorms.
There are three primary sources of water vapor that address this question: advection of water vapor largely from the Gulf of Mexico, evaporation over the Great Lakes, and transpiration from corn fields. The contribution from the Great Lakes in summer is minimal in comparison to the other factors, except maybe near the shorelines. Continue reading
