Weather – Long Range And Closer

This is the time of year when we begin to think seriously about the weather. The Midwest is far from “tornado alley” but we still get our share of dangerous storms. When I was a boy, I remember building a wind gauge from instructions I found in a science magazine. It was a pretty simple project and it didn’t work all that well, but it did spark my interest in learning more about the weather.

A few years later, the Heath Company brought out a kit that contained a wind gauge, indoor/outdoor thermometer, barometer, etc. Back then; this was about as close as you could get to having your own weather station. Now, with the Internet, you can access instantly access just about any weather related site in the world. 

My favorites are the sites that have radar! With radar, you can tell exactly where storm fronts are and how fast they are moving. Let’s start by logging onto www.intellicast.com/LocalWeather/World/UnitedStates/RadarLoop/. This will show you a map of the entire United States and any storms as they are happening. 

Next, log onto www.weather.com and type in your city or zip code. You’ll get a ten-day outlook and a radar map as well. Click on the map and you’ll put it in motion so you can see where the weather is coming from and where it’s going.

 It’s nice to know what’s going on around us, and I’ve talked about this before…but what I’d really like to have you check out is- Space Weather at www.spaceweather.com. This site is dedicated to exploring the Sun and its weather. The sun goes through an eleven-year cycle of minimum and maximum solar activity. We are presently in the last year or so of this maximum activity and the weather on the sun is really starting to “heat” up.

 If you could see the sun right now, you’d notice a large number of sunspots. Sunspots are magnetic storms some of which can be eight to ten times the size of the earth. Storms on the sun can influence us and the weather on the earth. Explosions within these storms eject protons and other particles into space that may collide with the earth. These particles are captured by the earth’s magnetic field and are focused along the magnetic lines of force encircling the planet. Most of the time, these “charged” particles are found near the earth’s magnetic poles, but in cases of intense magnet storms, these energetic particles can bring the aurora borealis as far south as Mexico. That’s happening now.

Can solar flares cause damage here on earth? Yes, though it’s rare. A flare on March 6^th, 1989 was so powerful that it caused disruptions in Canada’s power grids. Not only does it take a huge solar flare to cause damage here on earth, (93 million miles away) but the flare also has to be aimed in our direction. The largest flare ever recorded was unleashed on Monday April 2^nd, fortunately, the bulk of the particles it produced were aimed in another direction.

Here’s another site to investigate. It’s SOHO http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/ (No www in the address) and it’s loaded with articles, pictures, news etc. about the sun and it’s weather. There is even a “real time” solar wind gauge similar to the wind gauges we’re used to seeing on our nightly weather reports. The solar wind travels at an average of about 1 million miles an hour!

If you're interested in finding out more about the sun, remember- DON”T look at it without special eye protection. Here’s the best site I’ve found for anyone wanting to know more about how to observe the sun. It’s http://solar-center.stanford.edu/observe/observe.html. (Another address with no www) There’s information here on building a simple projection system using a couple of pieces of paper and there’s also a link to “Eyes On The Skies” a robotic solar telescope that you can control from your computer.

The last site on our “Weather” tour is www.csu.edu.au/weather.html. This is a site called “Weather & global monitoring” provided by Charles Sturt University. This site not only has weather related articles, it also has information on things such as Earthquakes, Volcanoes, Hurricanes, etc.

There’s more to learn about the weather than you can find by just turning on the tube and tuning in the weather channel. With the resources on the Net, you can interactively bounce from one Doppler radar site to another; you can plot a storm front moving across the country and know in seconds if it is going to effect you. You have resources at your finger tips that only the major television stations could afford just a few years ago, and all for the price of your monthly Internet connection.

Reach me at randy@randybenjamin.com.