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Category Archives: Meteorology
Is wildfire season getting longer?
Wildfires are an important part of many ecosystems and an essential part of forest and rangeland health.
Fires require fuel to burn, heat to ignite and oxygen to burn. Wildfire season is defined as the time of year when wildfires are most likely to ignite and spread. A combination of high temperatures, low humidity, lack of precipitation days and high winds make wildfires more likely to spread and lengthen fire seasons. Continue reading
What is the wet-bulb temperature?
The wet-bulb temperature is the lowest temperature to which unsaturated air can be cooled by evaporating liquid water into it.
This may sound horribly obscure, but it serves as a very useful measure of human comfort. It combines atmospheric humidity and temperature in a way that helps determine our comfort level while in the shade, especially during hot and humid conditions. Continue reading
What is a “wake low”?
Wake lows are short-lived mesoscale phenomena. Mesoscale weather ranges from about 5 kilometers to 1,000 kilometers in size.
Wake lows are relatively uncommon. They produce strong winds after a storm moves out. The term “wake low” was defined by Ted Fujita, the same meteorologist who came up with the F-scale ranking of tornadoes. These areas of low-pressure form on the backside of heavy rain, causing winds to surge in at fast speeds. Continue reading
What causes a thunderstorm?
Thunderstorm development requires three basic ingredients: moisture, unstable air and upward motion.
Moisture comes from regions like oceans, lakes and vegetation that provide the water vapor necessary for cloud formation and precipitation. Continue reading
Are daily weather forecasts affected by climate change?
A friend of ours recently asked whether the accuracy of day-to-day forecasts of weather is affected by climate change. This is a very interesting question whose answer helps to further elucidate the difference between climate and weather.
As it turns out, predictions of the coming weather are nearly exclusively dependent on the observed conditions of the atmosphere in the day (or days) prior to the forecast period. These conditions are known formally as initial conditions. Continue reading
Category: Climate, Meteorology, Uncategorized
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