How The Sci-Fi Generation Saved The World!
Posts tagged weather
~ For more than a hundred years there’s a weather station on top of the Zugspitze which nowadays also gathers data for the Global Atmosphere Watch. Doesn’t it look spacey?
We might be inclined to believe that the weather on Earth is sometimes less than hospitable to the life that inhabits it.
But compared to other planets, stars and bodies in the cosmos, the weather on Earth is downright mild.In fact, the storms on this tiny brown drawf located approximately 47 light-years away blow any earth storm away.
Here’s a look at the weather on planets and galaxies near and far.
Physicists use a laser to create rain
A team from the University of Geneva has used a mobile laser laboratory to trigger the formation of water droplets in the air — a step towards being able to create rain. During 113 hours of firings, the cloud physicists discovered that pulses of laser light create nitric acid particles in the air, which serve as condensation nuclei for droplets.
Those droplets only grew to a few micrometers in size — too small to overcome air turbulence and fall out under the influence of gravity as rain. Typically, droplets need to be around a tenth of a millimeter to begin to fall. However, the effect of the lasers is significant enough for the physicists to pursue the work further.
Where the wind don’t get ya, the storm surge will. How does it work?
Tropical storms like Hurricane Irene are essentially huge swirling blobs of wind and low pressure suck. When the cyclone of high winds swirls around and strikes the surface of the ocean, it essentially pushes the water higher under the area of the storm, aided by the low pressure in the hurricane center. If you want to try this at home, get a glass of water and blow across the top. See how the pressure of your breath can actually force the water to pile up? Now just imagine that the size of a hurricane.
For cities that don’t have adequate surge protection (like seawalls), as most major metros on the Eastern Seaboard do not, the surge can be a far deadlier force than the storm itself.
In fact, the deadliest natural disaster in American history was the Galveston, TX hurricane of 1900. A storm surge overtook the sea level island and killed as many as 12,000 people. The city was leveled, and before rebuilding they raised it 17 feet to avoid the same disaster.
Can’t imagine working on the Hubble for all these days and then having your landing delayed. But that’s what’s happening today. The crew of STS-125 won’t be landing until tomorrow, due to weather conditions at Kennedy.
This has been one of the more eventful and high profile missions since the program returned to flight. I’m sure there are some experiments to work on, and there are worse things than a day off 350 miles in orbit. So tonight there will again be two sets of people working and sleeping in space. One set aboard the ISS, the other on Atlantis!
NASA has really embraced interactive media with this mission, and there have also been quite a few independent companies that have popped up to support public interest in the program. And then, of course, there’s “Astro” Mike Massimo’s twitter stream, which I imagine will be pretty lively today. I’ll see if I can get a movie review from him!
I always leave a TV on in my office tuned to NASA on launch and landing day. It’s a tradition I’ve kept up for 4 years now, and it’s kind of nice that I can do that online as well. The talking you may be hearing is live coverage from Mission Control. You can get this feed yourself from http://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts125/status.html and you can shut it up by scrolling down a bit until you see the box with the talking people.
Here are the current landing opportunities for this weekend. KSC = Kennedy Space Center. EDW = Edwards Air Force Base, NOR, White Sands, New Mexico. Orbit = the number of times the ship has gone round. Looks like tomorrow morning is a good shot!
ORBIT…SITE…LANDING
Saturday, May 23:
180…..KSC….09:16 AM
181…..EDW….10:46 AM
181…..KSC….10:54 AM
182…..EDW….12:24 PM
Sunday, May 24:
196…..EDW….10:01 AM
196…..NOR….10:04 AM
196…..KSC….10:10 AM
197…..EDW….11:39 AM
197…..NOR….11:42 AM
197…..KSC….11:48 AM
