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How do you stay safe from lightning?
Lightning can be fun to watch but it is also very dangerous.
Approximately 300 people are injured by lightning each year, and about 62 people are killed. On average there is about one death caused by lightning in Wisconsin annually. Continue reading
Category: Phenomena, Severe Weather, Weather Dangers
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What are straight-line winds?
The term “straight-line winds” describes ground-level winds that come out of a thunderstorm and do not have rotation. If these winds travel at speeds that exceed 57 mph, the storm is classified as a severe thunderstorm. Storms with severe straight-line winds can also have hail and tornadoes.
Straight-line winds can cause considerable damage because these winds often do not let up. Straight-line winds will push objects over, all in the same direction as the wind is blowing. Continue reading
Category: Meteorology, Severe Weather, Weather Dangers
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Why does it smell good after a rain?
Many times after a rain, there is a distinctive odor in the air — a sort of musky smell. This pleasant fragrance is most common in rains that follow a dry spell.
The phenomenon is referred to as petrichor, from the Greek roots petra (stone) and ichor (the blood of gods in Greek mythology). If you are a gardener, you may find this smell similar to the smell you sense when you turn over your soil. Good organic soils contain bacteria, and a bacterium that is abundant in damp warm soils is actinomycete. Continue reading
Does Memorial Day or Labor Day have better weather?
A Memorial Day traditionally marks the beginning of the summer while Labor Day marks the end. People are bound to have their own recollections and opinions about which weekend more reliably delivers agreeable weather here in southern Wisconsin and those opinions can be colored by many non-meteorological influences.
If forced to opine on this question while sticking to strictly meteorological factors, we would suggest that Labor Day weekend’s weather is more reliably summerlike. The reason for this comes directly from the fact that Memorial Day comes as winter is ending and Labor Day as winter approaches. Continue reading
Can subtle changes in sky color impact summer high temperatures?
There are spring and summer afternoons when very thin clouds appear overhead and turn the sky a bit white. These types of skies are physically interesting in at least two ways that are worthy of note.
First, the whiteness is a function of the fact that the cloud cover is a thin cirrus cloud. Cirrus clouds are composed of tiny ice crystals that scatter visible light without preference for any of the colors of the visible spectrum (the colors of the rainbow). This particular property is shared by snowflakes as well as by haze droplets. Individual snowflakes look clear but even a small collection of them is white since all of the light that hits the collection of snowflakes is scattered in all directions equally. The same is true of haze droplets which are most common in the summertime in southern Wisconsin. Continue reading
Category: Meteorology, Phenomena
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