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Category Archives: Meteorology
What holds the clouds up in the air and what makes some clouds appear to be fluffy on top but flat on the bottom?
One of our readers awoke to some beautiful clouds in the summer sky recently and two excellent questions popped into her mind: What holds the clouds up in the air and what makes some clouds appear to be fluffy on top but flat on the bottom?
Clouds are composed of tiny liquid water droplets — whose diameters are about the width of a human hair — and tiny shards of ice in a variety of shapes, or habits. Whether a cloud is mostly liquid water droplets or ice particles depends, as you might guess, on the ambient temperature of the air in the cloud. Continue reading
Category: Meteorology, Uncategorized
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Can wildfires generate weather?
Fires require something to burn plus air to supply oxygen and a heat source to get the fuel to its ignition temperature.
Once a fire starts, weather is one factor of how it will spread and if it will grow. The important weather factors are temperature, wind and humidity. Warmer temperatures allow fuels to ignite quickly, and low humidity keeps the fuel dry and easy to burn. Wind brings oxygen to the fire and also can help to spread it. Continue reading
Category: Meteorology, Phenomena, Severe Weather, Weather Dangers
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Was May abnormal this year?
The just completed month of May was quite unusual in southern Wisconsin this year.
First, it was a bit cooler than normal, with the average temperature ending up 0.6 degrees below normal. Dryness over central and western Canada brought large wildfires to those areas much earlier than normal this year, and the smoke from those fires gave us a number of orangey sunrises and sunsets this past month, which are more normal in July and August. Continue reading
Are the number of thunderstorms in Wisconsin decreasing?
This question comes from one of our readers, based on casual observation. It is always good to get data and analyze such a generalization to find the best answer. So, we turned to the Wisconsin State Climatology Office.
The National Weather Service records the number of thunderstorm days at several sites across the U.S. A thunderstorm day is when thunder or lightning is detected at least once during the day. Since the mid-1990s, the nation’s primary surface weather observation network is the Automated Surface Observing Systems, or ASOS program, which has essentially replaced human observers. Continue reading
Category: Climate, Meteorology, Severe Weather
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Why was the sun so red this past week?
Light is a form of electromagnetic energy that does not need matter to propagate. We can characterize this energy by its wavelength, which is the distance along a wave from one crest to another. Our eyes are sensitive to light with wavelengths between approximately 0.4 to 0.7 microns. Blue colors have shorter wavelengths, while red colors have longer ones.
When light interacts with particles suspended in air, it can be scattered or absorbed. Energy that is scattered causes a change in direction of the light path. The amount of light that is being scattered is a function of the size of the particle relative to the wavelength of the light falling on the particle. While all colors are scattered by air molecules, violet and blue are scattered most. The sky looks blue, not violet, because our eyes are more sensitive to blue light. Continue reading
Category: Meteorology, Phenomena, Weather Dangers
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