Monday, December 4, 2017

DVD, Core Meteorology

A series of DVD, director: Ron Meyer. Runtime: 30 minutes.
For grade 7 - College

Atmosphere

It is the atmosphere that creates relatively constant daytime versus nighttime temperatures, like the temperatures found on the earth. In our solar system, no atmosphere means no possibility of life.
We live on the earth. More precisely, we live in the troposphere of the earth, like fish in the water.
The stratosphere is home to the jet stream. Also home to Ozone.
The atmosphere is a delicate dynamic balance. A balance absolutely critical for all life on the planet.
heat conduction: the pan doesn’t move.
Remarkably, the most important part of this story for us is that the troposphere is heated from the bottom to the top. In spite of being the furthest from the sun, the air closest to the ground is warmer than the air 5 miles closer to the sun.
The heat move around the atmosphere is called weather. All weather happens in the lower atmosphere.

weather

3 factor affect weather prediction:
  1. initial state has some gap information
  2. model is not perfect
  3. the principle of time and size

climate

Climate is a pattern over time.
Human is adapted to these stable climate patterns as well.

NG- Natural disasters

1993 Storm of the Century

3 different weather models predict different storm track.
No matter how well we can predict this, we can’t stop it from occurring. If we had control of it, the meteorologist would make more money than professional sports players make.
I may lose a few toes, not a big deal… you are in good spirit.

2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami

Earthquake is actually good to release earth’s internal energy. A solution is to create a small man-made earthquake to defuse a big one.
Experimenting with mother nature is a very difficult thing. We may trigger a bigger earthquake than the one we were trying to prevent.
Inducing quakes is an inexact science.
A 30 billion question: how often does a city like New Orleans get hit by a Category Five hurricane? Experiments show New Orleans is living in its borrowing time. A major hurricane is overdue.
Project Stormfury is trying to intervene the hurricane, but failed.
The benefit of a hurricane is redistributing heat in the atmosphere.

Tornado intercept

Tim Samra died in 2013 in Oklahoma, the first known death as a storm chaser.
Tim Samaras did not seem startled by the question from his love child, Matt Winter. “Matt,” he replied, “Kathy’s a strong woman. She understands this is my passion. And if something happened to me, she’d move on.”