Clouds are an ever-present feature of much of Earth’s geography. Floating in the sky, often harmlessly, clouds don’t have much bearing on our lives – aside from dictating when we need to pull out our jackets or umbrellas, or in…
Read more
Though meteorological experts have a variety of means for determining when a storm’s brewing in the sky, there’s one very simple method available to every layman on the planet: the sky’s getting dark. The base of the clouds floating overhead…
Read more
Sometimes on a humid day, a thunderstorm forms and dumps sheets of rain in no time. That can be heavy enough for the National Weather Service to prompt a flash flood warning due to rising rivers or severe puddles on the ground…
Read more
Like all precipitation, snow forms high in the atmosphere. The temperature there is below the freezing point of water, but until a water molecule is jostled, it will stay in a liquid state. Only supercooled water can freeze quickly enough…
Read more
The same clouds that spawn thunderstorms and tornadoes also can produce hail. They are cumulonimbus clouds, the classic anvil-shaped forms that can reach from 30,000 feet altitude to 60,000 feet. That is very cold territory. They also house strong updrafts…
Read more
Lightning and thunder storms are a wonder of nature to some and an absolute terror to others. Though a fascinating phenomenon, lightning storms are probably what you’d imagine a clash between the gods would sound like, the rumbling of massive…
Read more
Lightning is one of the great mysteries of nature that man fears most. What, after all, could possibly be scarier than a massive, sudden bolt of electricity from the sky that can kill a human being in a split second?…
Read more
Stand in a field when new snow has covered the hillsides and you feel it, a sort of hush that comes over the landscape. It isn’t just imagination or the appreciation of a beautiful sight. Newly fallen snow absorbs sounds…
Read more
Fog, smog and mist. Three seemingly similar things that are actually quite different – or at least they are for one third of the words. All that most people need to know is that they all impair visibility, and consequently…
Read more
To say that there’s a ‘theory’ behind lightning and thunder is a bit of a fallacy these days because science has, at the very least, more or less figured out thunder. Lightning is still a bit of a mystery, or…
Read more