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This blogger is trying to find the town of Tecuci, Romania, under the snow! For some reason, the Google translation renders the town’s name as Tecumseh. There are more pictures of the huge snowfall at the site Criserb. Link -via Buzzfeed
This picture was taken yesterday in Mirabel, Quebec. There was some discussion of its location at reddit, where we are assured that in France, stop signs say “Stop” instead of “Arret.” Link -via reddit
(Image credit: benim ergani)
One way to make yourself feel warmer this winter is to watch a movie in which people are even colder than you are. Unreality magazine has some suggestion you may not have considered, like the 1965 film Dr. Zhivago.
This classic epic about the Russian Revolution from Davide Lean is winter on steroids — frozen lakes, fur coats, and a palace encrusted in ice. This movie also features Obi-Wan Kenobi and one of cinema’s finest mustaches. You really can’t argue with that.
Plus Omar Sharif was really easy on the eyes. Link
When big storms hit the coast, adult seals can swim through the rough seas, but little guys often end up abandoned on the beach. Fortunately, the RSPCA is there to help treat them and care for them until the cool weather recedes. Best of all, we’re left with dozens of adorable baby seal pictures to cheer us up during these cold months.
The Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra asked its fans to Tweet their tips for keeping warm in the winter. Then the chorus sang those Tweets to the tune of O Fortuna! -via the Presurfer
Previously: The Original Lyrics
George Merryweather was a doctor in Whitby, on the British coast of Yorkshire. He was also an inventor.
…the thing which Mr. Merryweather became truly famous for was his “Atmospheric, Electromagnetic Telegraph, conducted by Animal Instinct,” or, more shortly, his Tempest Prognosticator,” which he built for the Great Exhibition of 1851. It is a beautiful structure, with a bell at the top designed to look like the dome at St. Pauls. Around the bottom are placed a dozen glass bottles; threading from tiny hammers around the edge of the bell are threads, which connect to a piece of whalebone just inside the neck of each bottle. Inside each bottle is poured an inch of rainwater and then — oh happy home! — each bottle is occupied by a leech. A common, ordinary surgical leech.
Being a doctor, Merryweather had observed that medical leeches responded to barometric pressure or electrical charge in the air, or whatever it is that allows smaller animals to know when bad weather is afoot. The leeches’ response was to climb — probably a good response for water-dwelling creatures just before a rain, so that they don’t get washed away. So when Merryweather’s leeches climbed to the top of the bottle, they nudged the piece of whalebone, which caused the string to move and ring the bell. It’s not clear, but it appears that the more the bell rang before a storm, the worse the weather to come.
The Tempest Prognosticator proved to be surprisingly accurate, but did not catch on because it was not considered scientific enough. Read more about the device at Cabinet of Wonders, on a visit to the Whitby Museum, where Merryweather’s device is housed. Link
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In 1959, Marine Corps pilot William Rankin was cruising at nine miles above the earth in an F-8 Crusader combat jet when something went wrong and he had to eject. Between him and the ground was a big, black storm.
After falling through damp darkness for an interminable time, Rankin began to grow concerned that the automatic switch on his parachute had malfunctioned. He felt certain that he had been descending for several minutes, though he was aware that one’s sense of time is a fickle thing under such distracting circumstances. He fingered the rip cord anxiously, wondering whether to give it a yank. He’d lost all feeling in his left hand, and his other limbs weren’t faring much better. It was then that he felt a sharp and familiar upward tug on his harness–his parachute had deployed. It was too dark to see the chute’s canopy above him, but he tugged on the risers and concluded that it had indeed inflated properly. This was a welcome reprieve from the wet-and-windy free-fall.
Unfortunately for the impaired pilot, he was nowhere near the 10,000 foot altitude he expected. Strong updrafts in the cell had decreased his terminal velocity substantially, and the volatile storm had triggered his barometric parachute switch prematurely. Bill Rankin was still far from the earth, and he was now dangling helplessly in the belly of an oblivious monstrosity.
A cumulonimbus “anvil” cloud.“I’d see lightning,” Rankin would later muse, “Boy, do I remember that lightning. I never exactly heard the thunder; I felt it.” Amidst the electrical spectacle, the storm’s capricious winds pressed Rankin downward until he encountered the powerful updrafts—the same updrafts that keep hailstones aloft as they accumulate ice–which dragged him and his chute thousands of feet back up into the storm. This dangerous effect is familiar to paragliding enthusiasts, who unaffectionately refer to it as cloud suck. At the apex Rankin caught up with his parachute, causing it to drape over him like a wet blanket and stir worries that he would become entangled with it and drop from the sky at a truly terminal velocity. Again he fell, and again the updrafts yanked him skyward in the darkness. He lost count of how many times this up-and-down cycle repeated. “At one point I got seasick and heaved,” he once retold.
After that, it gets interesting. Damn Interesting, in fact, which is where you can read the whole story. Link
Hurricane Irene is causing havoc along the east coast, but some business owners in its path retained their sense of humor, at least long enough to thumb their noses at the storm -just before evacuating. See a collection of such business signs at Buzzfeed. This one is my favorite. Link
This whole-earth image was taken Friday morning by the NASA/NOAA GOES-13 satellite. It shows Hurricane Irene to be about 510 miles wide. NASA has more information and images at the website. Link -via Boing Boing
(Image credit: Flickr user NASA Goddard Photo and Video)
That Fabio is everywhere lately, isn’t he? And now he’s on KOIN-TV in Portland, Ore., doing the weather (Portland is home to Wieden + Kennedy, the ad agency responsible for the Old Spice ads). It’s fantastic. Perhaps my favorite line: “It’s very sunny today and it feels so nice on Fabio’s skin. Thank you, sun.” But I’m also fond of “Very romantic, Fabio hair blowing, lots and lots of wind, and pushing the storm front right up into Canada. I’m so sorry, Canada.”
Bake cookies in a car? You betcha! In Amarillo, the temperatures have soared to over 100 degrees, and about 200 degrees in a closed car. Brittany Nunn of the Amarillo Globe-News baked chocolate chip cookies in her car. They took quite a while to bake, but the car smelled wonderful afterward. Link -via reddit
Musical Buoy in Search Towards a New Shore (Dedicated to Melvin Maddocks)
Wood, data, reed | 2009
TED Global Fellow Nathalie Meibach’s sculptures are a little complicated. On the surface they look like pumped-up versions of those wooden bead mazes for children. But Miebach’s work begins by translating weather data from cities into musical scores, which she then uses to build vibrant, whimsical sculptures. She enlists musicians for collaboration in bringing the musical scores to life, which accompany the sculptures on display. You can listen to and download the track on Meibach’s site, where you’ll also find a nice gallery of her work.
via Brain Pickings
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Discussion about weather is often relegated to the realm of awkward small-talk and complaints about the heat/snow/rain, but extraplanetary weather is a different thing altogether… at least for me. These images of a storm over Saturn’s surface–the largest ever recorded on the planet–are interesting and beautiful. The false color doesn’t hurt, but it’s still so massive that imagining it takes a bit of brain yoga.
First detected in December 2010, the storm has developed from a small spot into a raging storm covering an area about 4 billion square kilometres, or eight times the surface of the Earth, in Saturn’s northern hemisphere.
The false colours on the images mark the different altitudes of clouds: blue clouds reside at the highest altitude with those in red at the lowest. The two high-resolution images at the bottom are mosaics, each made up of 84 images taken over 4.5 hours. The lower of the two was taken 11 hours, or one Saturn day, after the first.
The top two images are enlargements taken from the earlier of the two bottom images. They show the head of the storm (top left) and its turbulent middle (top right). Calculations reveal that the head of the storm is moving west at a speed of about 100 kilometres per hour.
Link | Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI
Dr. JeffMasters of Weather Underground was astonished at the weather extremes of 2010. There was so many weather events that he put off writing about it for six months.
Every year extraordinary weather events rock the Earth. Records that have stood centuries are broken. Great floods, droughts, and storms affect millions of people, and truly exceptional weather events unprecedented in human history may occur. But the wild roller-coaster ride of incredible weather events during 2010, in my mind, makes that year the planet’s most extraordinary year for extreme weather since reliable global upper-air data began in the late 1940s. Never in my 30 years as a meteorologist have I witnessed a year like 2010–the astonishing number of weather disasters and unprecedented wild swings in Earth’s atmospheric circulation were like nothing I’ve seen. The pace of incredible extreme weather events in the U.S. over the past few months have kept me so busy that I’ve been unable to write-up a retrospective look at the weather events of 2010. But I’ve finally managed to finish, so fasten your seat belts for a tour through the top twenty most remarkable weather events of 2010.
What follows is a rundown of weather events from “Snowmageddon” to record flooding the world over, with plenty of graphs, charts, and videos to explain them. Link -via Fark
Did you know that in the 1940s, it was forbidden to use the word “tornado” in a weather forecast? Since there was no way to accurately predict a tornado, there was no use in causing panic. Even after the Air Force found a method of predicting the storms, no one wanted to say it -until 1952.
Only a few weeks after signing on as WKY-TV’s weatherman, Harry Volkman made broadcast history. The Oklahoma City station was near enough to Tinker Field that they could pick up weather alerts issued to personnel at the Air Force Base. On the afternoon of March 21, 1952, station manager P.A. “Buddy” Sugg learned that a “tornado risk” for central Oklahoma had been announced by meteorologists at the Base and he instructed Volkman to relay the information on the air. Volkman hesitated, worried that he could very well be arrested (since the word “tornado” was still officially verboten by the FCC), but Sugg told him, “They’d arrest me, not you; you’re just following my orders.”
Harry Volkman informed viewers of the impending storm, using the word “tornado” during a weather broadcast for the first time and probably saving some lives in the process, as that particular storm system ended up being the ninth deadliest tornado outbreak in U.S. history.
Mental_floss has more tornado history: the first account of a tornado in America, the first accurate forecast, the first photographed tornado, and more. Link
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Teacher David Crichton was holding a physical education class outdoors in Galashiels, Scotland, last week when worms began raining from the sky.
The boys heard a “soft thudding” on the artificial pitch – then looked up to see dozens of worms plummeting from the sky.
David, 26, said he and other teachers at Galashiels Academy were baffled by the incident.
And they later found more worms spread across a school tennis court almost 100 yards from the pitch. He said: “We started hearing this wee thudding noise. There were about 20 worms on the ground.
School staff eventually found about 120 worms. It is believed that a freak weather event lifted the worms along with water from a nearby river. The story was first reported on April first, but there is of yet no indication that it was an April Fool. Link -via Fortean Times
(Image credit: Kingdom News Agency)
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National Geographic News talks about Groundhog Day, Punxsutawney Phil, and the weather. They include a look at the origins of February 2nd forecasting, which began with the Roman Empire, when folks considered the weather on Candlemas to predict future weather.
Legend has it that the Romans also believed that conditions during the first days of February were good predictors of future weather, but the empire looked to hedgehogs for their forecasts.
These two traditions melded in Germany and were brought over to the United States by German immigrants who settled in Pennsylvania. Lacking hedgehogs, the German settlers substituted native groundhogs in the ritual, and Groundhog Day was born.
So have we’ve been using the wrong animal all these years? Should we instead say “Happy Hedgehog Day”? Link
(Image credit: Melissa Farlow/National Geographic)
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Worldwide lightning strikes for the six month period May-Oct 2010 have been compiled into a database and plotted on maps. Embedded above is the distribution of lightning in the United States; the deep purple color represents 32 ground strikes within a 20-km grid.
A map of worldwide lightning distribution is available at the Accu-Weather link.
Imagine being hit in the head by a heavy object falling at around 100 miles per hour. Hailstones kill, and sometimes they kill many people at a time.
In 1942 a British forest guard in Roopkund, India made an alarming discovery. Some 16,000 feet above sea level, at the bottom of a small valley, was a frozen lake absolutely full of skeletons. That summer, ice melt revealed even more skeletal remains, floating in the water and lying haphazardly around the lake’s edges. Something horrible had happened here.
A National Geographic team set out to examine the bones in 2004. Besides dating the remains to around 850 AD, the team realized that everyone at the “Skeleton Lake” had died from blows to the head and shoulders caused by “blunt, round objects about the size of cricket balls.”
This eventually led the team to one conclusion: In 850 AD this group of 200 some travelers was crossing this valley when they were caught in a sudden and severe hailstorm.
Arlas Obscura has more stories of killer hailstorms from ancient times to the 21st century. Link -Thanks, Dylan!
Weather has been available on Google Earth for several years, but the latest version has the capacity to show real-time weather information.
To see it, you must first enable the clouds layer, and then zoom in to a location where it’s raining or snowing. Google Earth displays rain and snow only in certain parts of North America and Europe; to see where exactly the new feature is available, enable the radar layer.
Henceforth it will no longer be necessary to get up from one’s desk and go to the window to see whether it’s raining.
Link and image credit.
New York City is suffering from a heat wave. Temperatures soared to 103 degrees in Central Park last Tuesday. Yes, that’s hot, but on July 9th, 1936, back when very few people had access to air conditioning, Central Park saw 106 degrees -the hottest temperature ever recorded for the city! Here’s how the New York Times described it:
“In the great shopping districts in the Thirties, the pavements became so soft in late afternoon that the crosswalks were dotted with rubber heels that were caught in the asphalt and tar as women passed by. …In Syracuse, on one of the main streets, a housewife fried an egg on the pavement; at Perry, N.Y., an absent-minded man who left his false teeth on the window sill returned within an hour to find them melted away.
Melted dentures? That’s hot! Link
There is a positive correlation between the sale of miniskirts and subsequent warmer weather:
The rises and falls in the length of skirts are said to be a good way of forecasting what the weather will be like three days in advance, based on research at eBay.
Analysts at the company said the length of skirts sold on the website becomes shorter several days before the weather changes for the better, and lengthens when colder conditions are due.
On occasions, the trend is said to have predicted a shift in the weather before any advice has been issued by the Met Office using more traditional meteorological methods.
Link | Photo via Flickr user colros used under Creative Commons license
What would happen if a tropical storm hit the oil floating in the Gulf? It depends on the storm, and exactly where it meets the oil.
Much depends on the angle at which the storm crosses the slick. In the Northern Hemisphere, hurricanes rotate counterclockwise, with the largest storm surge occurring where the winds blow in the direction the storm as a whole is traveling—that’s in front of the eye and off to the right. (Meteorologists worry over a hurricane’s dangerous “right-front quadrant.”) So if a powerful storm approached the slick from the southwest, say, its most potent winds would push the oil forward, instead of sweeping it off to the side and out of the storm’s path. If the storm then plowed into the Gulf Coast, you’d expect an oily landfall.
Artist Erik Guzman has just installed a very cool art concept in New York City’s World Financial Plaza. The installation is a concoction of “moving gears and flashing lights” that is constantly changing based on weather data. As the weather changes, the art responds, changing in its own interpretive way, creating neat designs and patterns.
But how? This weather data is received via radio waves, which then get turned into visual representations of spring breezes, winter winds, and we’re guessing that lovely NYC summer humidity (warm garbage smell not included).
From the Upcoming 
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On its face, April Fools’ Day seems like a lighthearted opportunity to play practical jokes and pranks on your friends and coworkers, but it’s easy to see the problem with having such a wacky day filled with falsities and gags. Namely, what happens when something of real consequence actually takes place on April 1st, but people don’t believe it because they automatically think it’s a prank? Here’s a few true tales of actual events that occurred on April 1st that were anything but gags.
Google is known for announcing ridiculous news stories, such as telepathic search engines and job openings on the moon, on April Fools’ Day. The thing is, when you are known for this sort of tom foolery, it makes it difficult to be taken seriously when you have real news on April 1st.
Humorously enough, the company has decided to take advantage of the viral marketing people give to the news they announce that day, so they have actually made announcements for real products and services at the same time. In 2004 (the same year they created job listings for the moon), they announced the release of Gmail. While this may not seem all that funny, many people still thought it was a prank because the idea of a mail service with one full gigabyte of storage seemed preposterous –at the time, Hotmail only offered 2 megabytes. They followed the success of this announcement by announcing the increase of the mail service’s storage to two gigabytes the next year, also on April Fools’ Day.
In a company that plays such major pranks on the nation every year, it seems likely that the employees must play some really great jokes on each other come April 1st. As such, when an employee’s pet ball python escaped its enclosure on the holiday, the news was met with some disbelief. Unfortunately, this time the news was real. An email was sent out to the entire staff that started out, “The timing of this email could not be more awkward.” It then moved on to say:
“Tempting as it might be, this is not an April Fool’s joke! We are sending this message to alert you to the situation and to let you know what to do in the event you see the snake. “
At least the sender recognized the humor of the situation. In case you were worried about the critter, he was eventually found and returned to his owner’s house a few days later.
Image via Char1iej [Flickr]
Whereas Google has mastered the art of cleverly announcing real news on April Fools’ Day in order to play with the minds of the public, CBS obviously has a lot to learn about making serious announcements on April 1st. Last year, they infuriated a number of loyal viewers by announcing the cancellation of the seventy-two year old daytime soap Guiding Light on April Fools’ Day. As one angry commenter wrote on TV Squad:
“If it’s true, you’re jerks for announcing it today. And if it’s not true, then everyone who believes you was a jerk for believing such a story on April Fools’ Day.”
Unfortunately, not all real news on April Fools’ Day is as minor as a lost python or canceled TV show. There are many situations where people do not believe a person has died, simply because of the date. Unfortunately, the three best examples of this are all so strange that it’s not surprising that people believed the news to be a hoax.
In 1984, one day before his 45th birthday, Marvin Gaye was murdered by his own father after intervening in an argument between his parents. Many fans refused to believe the news because it seemed so odd that his dad would have been the murderer. It wasn’t until the news was confirmed officially that many people stopped believing the murder was more than a cruel April Fools’ Day joke.
Surprisingly, Marvin Senior was only found guilty of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to five years imprisonment because his son beat him before the shooting.
If you heard a NASCAR champion nicknamed “The Polish Prince” died in a Hooters corporate plane on April Fools’ Day, would you believe it? A lot of fans thought they were hearing a bad joke in 1993 when racing star Alan Kulwicki was announced to be dead in exactly those circumstances.
Image via jbspec7 [Flickr]
Is there a more fitting day for a comedian to die than April Fools’ Day? While Mitch Hedberg actually died on March 30, 2005, the news wasn’t spread to the media until very late on March 31st. Not surprisingly, many people thought the death was merely a prank or a bad publicity stunt put on by Mitch himself.
Perhaps the only situation that is worse than one person dying on April Fools’ Day is the so-called April Fools’ Tsunami of 1946, when over 100 people died, largely because they believed storm warnings were a joke. The incident occurred after an massive earthquake on the Aleutian Islands near Alaska, which caused a series of massive tidal waves that spread all the way to South America. Most of the damage hit Hawaii though, where the tsunami reached up to 45 feet tall. Unfortunately, because so many people doubted the news of the impending tidal wave and refused to evacuate, over 165 people died -159 of them in Hawaii.
Interestingly, perhaps this was a bit of a sick prank on the part of Mother Nature, because scientists are still unable to find any reason the 7.8 magnitude earthquake was able to launch such a massive tsunami. It was originally thought that the waves were intensified by a major underwater landslide in the area, but scientists have still found no evidence of this hypothetical landslide. One of the researchers who recently mapped the ocean floor looking for a landslide in the area summed up the matter by noting, “almost 60 years after the event, the 1946 tsunami is still making fools of all of us.”
What about you, readers? Have you ever thought something that happened on April 1st was actually a joke, only to find out later that it was actually 100% true?
Artist Valerie Lamontagne made dresses that respond to weather data transmitted wirelessly to them. The dresses respond by variously illuminating or vibrating:
the project is titled ‘peau d’ane’ after a fairy tale by charles perrault detailing three dresses made from the sky, moonbeams and sunlight. while each of these things is immaterial, lamontagne found ways to materialize them in her dresses. temperature, UV, solar radiation, wind speed & velocity, humidity and rain fall data is collected and sent to the dresses wirelessly, where micro-controllers relay info to internal circuitry. the sun dress has 128 LEDs which can light up depending on sun data, while the moon dress has 14 colour-modulating flowers to represent each phase of the moon cycle and the sky dress is imbued with 14 vibrating air pockets.
Link via DVICE | Artist’s Website
Hair ice, also called silk frost, is a type of ice formation that looks like silk and seems to only appear on woody, barkless materials on the ground. The ice structures tend to grow out of a small pore in the wood, sort of like hairs on the human head. Dr. James Carter has more on the phenomenon (and more photos too) on his site.
John and Kay Ure live in a former lighthouse keeper’s cottage at the edge of a cliff on the coast of northern Scotland. On December 19th, Kay Ure left to go buy a Christmas turkey in Inverness. Before she could return, a snowstorm blocked the road and she had to stay in the village of Durness, eleven miles from home.
Mr Ure spent Christmas and New Year on his own and celebrated his 58th birthday last Sunday with a tin of baked beans.
Yesterday, for the first time since mid-December, he managed to drive 11 miles to a small jetty and cross the Kyle of Durness by boat to collect his wife and the turkey.
The couple run the country’s “most isolated tearoom” at the end of an ungritted army road and were forced to spend their first festive season apart in 35 years.
John Ure was down to emergency rations before he could drive to town. He said reuniting with his wife was like a “second honeymoon”. Link -via Arbroath
(image credit: Peter Jolly)
Unusually cold temperatures in southern Florida are causing a novel problem -falling iguanas. Iguanas are an invasive species in Florida due to pet owners abandoning the lizards. When the temperature falls below 40 degrees, they automatically begin to hibernate and fall out of the trees they live in. Ron Magill of Miami Metrozoo has a warning for those who find the iguanas.
“I knew of a gentleman who was collecting them off the street and throwing them in the back of his station wagon, and all of a sudden these things are coming alive, crawling on his back and almost caused a wreck,” Magill said.
The stories of “kamikaze iguanas” plummeting from trees were urban legends in Florida, but now have a plausible explanation. Link (with video)
Weather is explained in Star Wars terms on this site. Enter a city and get the current conditions, whether it’s like Hoth, Endor, Tatooine, Naboo, or some other planet in the Star Wars universe. Enter a city it doesn’t have listed, and the result will be Alderaan, meaning not there. Link -via b3ta
