Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal

Following on the very popular Large Hadron Collider Rap a few months back, there is a newer one based on the FRIB project in Michigan. Very nice production value and VERY educational!

Which proves Physicists can be very cool!

Enjoy!

There is a small group of people, whose war on science mantra, is that the truth cannot get published in the peer reviewed journals. It’s one of these conspiracy theories, like the ones that say we did not land on the moon, or Roswell UFO’s.

It’s ridiculous of course, because the quickest way to get famous in the science world is to write a paper that blows an accepted theory out of the water! Let me tell you about two recent examples of  people who did just that. One of them is happening right now! It’s in Atmospheric Science too.

The first has to do with expansion of the Universe. The average guy on the street knows the Universe is expanding, excluding the ones Jay Leno runs into. (American joke, for those of you in other exotic lands, that I long to visit) What most people do not know, is that this rate of expansion is INCREASING. This goes against what everyone thought 20 years ago. It was widely assumed that the rate of expansion was slowly decreasing and at an infinite time in the future, it would stop.

Thanks to XKCD.COM for this hilarious and true (well mostly) explanation of the electromagnetic spectrum! Click for full size.

The Hubble Deep Field. The Galaxies are flying apart more rapidly - but why?

What’s causing it?

NO ONE KNOWS.

The force is called dark energy because it cannot be seen or explained, but it must be there. One of the Astronomers on the team who discovered this increasing expansion is Alex Filippenko of U.Cal. Berkeley.

I’ve written about his fabulous course on Astronomy for non science majors, here before. You can view the ENTIRE series of lectures online and you will really enjoy it. TRUST ME. (first lecture audio is a bit hot).

This discovery has made he and his team very well known in the science world and even among the public at large. You have probably heard or read something about dark energy and the expanding universe already!

Now, here is an interesting tidbit mentioned on one of his lectures. In the real world of Physics, cool things give off heat in the infra red region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Satellites I look at daily, are usually IR images. They are detecting light that our eyes cannot see. If the clouds were to suddenly heat up to 500 degrees, we would not need an IR satellite sensor to see them at night. They would glow red!

Just because we cannot see it with our eyes, does not mean that electromagnetic radiation is not light. It is no different than radio waves, or x rays. They are ALL light. Some animals see ultra-violet and infrared light,we Homo sapiens cannot.

Same thing with stars. Cool stars are red, and hotter stars like our sun are whiter, while giant very hot stars are Blue. So in the real universe, red is cold and blue is hot.

5 Day Forecast from KIRO TV Seattle web site. Notice the cool night time temps. are labeled blue.

SO WHY ARE FAUCETS LABELED BLUE FOR COLD AND RED FOR HOT!

We TV Meteorologists are guilty of this too!

Look at the 7 day forecast for Seattle from KIRO TV. (Mine uses white numbers, but I have used blue in the past, so I am guilty as well!

Dr. Filippenko collects these mislabeled images and he has a good discussion of it in the 2007 series of online lectures. I won’t tell you which one, because watching them all will fill your mind with the wonder of the universe.

The other example of blowing out a long accepted theory also has to with labels and pictures not imitating physical reality. In this case it is rain drops! They are always drawn incorrectly!

A little background first. Galileo was among the first to realize that the weight of something has nothing to with how fast it falls. Drop an anvil off a tall building and it will speed up by 9.81 meters per second, every second. A feather will not.

Obviously, because of wind resistance. This was illustrated by one of the Apollo Astronauts, who dropped a hammer and feather, on the airless moon. Galileo was proved right!

On earth, a falling object reaches what is called terminal velocity. This speed is a balance between the force of gravity pulling down and the wind resistance pushing up. If you jump from an airplane at 1,000 meters or 5,000 meters, without a parachute, you will still hit the ground at a little over 100 mph. You will of course, be just as dead in either case.

Do raindrops look like this?? (dan's pic)

It’s long been known that raindrops fall at a terminal velocity with larger raindrops falling faster than smaller ones. As a rain drop gets larger it has more mass, while increasing much less in area, so it’s momentum increases faster than the increasing air resistance. This has been proven in at least a half dozen studies. I was taught this many years ago as an undergrad at Okla. University. Every Meteorologist knows this. Apparently, we are all wrong too!

Three scientists have just published a paper that shows conclusive evidence that some rain drops fall an order of magnitude faster than predicted! These “super terminal” drops are thought to form from the break up of large drops in collisions as they fall.

Falling raindrops Look more like squished buns! My wife took the bun back!

This has important implications in using radar to estimate rainfall totals. Increasingly Doppler Radar and the new Dual Polarimetric Radars, are being used to measure rainfall in remote areas for hydrological and short fused flood warning purposes.

Nearly all of the NOAA Weather radars in the USA will be upgraded to dual pole capability soon. The TV station I work for was the first station in the world to begin using this technology. We call the radar ARMOR. That stands for Advanced Radar for Meteor. Operations and Research.

This discovery promises to make these rainfall estimations more accurate. Our radar is a joint project with the U. of Alabama at Huntsville. We use it to monitor storms, and they for research. Dr. Walt Petersen is the lead scientist and is working on several studies for NASA, and this discovery might just be beneficial.

While Alex Fillipenko has his hot and cold issue, I have a rain drop issue. Most people think they look like – well, you know, rain drops. They don’t! Falling drops look more like hamburger buns, well close anyhow, and definitely not like the image I took of my wife holding the eye dropper!

So Doctor Filippenko, if you read this, I promise to never use blue numbers for lows on weather maps, but you have to draw any raindrops like squashed hamburger buns!

Icebergs Near Greenland (Dan's Pic)

There has been a lot of climate science published in regards to Oceans lately. The acidification of ocean water due to increased levels of CO2 is finally getting the coverage it should have had two or three years ago.

Ocean chemistry is complex, and just how quickly the Ph will drop in sea water is uncertain. It’s already dropped significantly and there is growing evidence that this happened several times in the deep past on Earth. Currently Ocean Ph is about 8.10 compared to 8.18 in the 1700′s. Ph is a logarithmic scale, so a drop of one point is a lot.

For those not frightened of a little chemistry, a good explanation of the buffering of sea water can be found here. Human blood is buffered the same way.

Make no mistake, the oceans are the life blood of this planet. Any weather forecast model that does not take the Ocean/atmosphere interaction into account will not make decent forecasts beyond a day or two into the future.

Much work is underway to improve the physics in these models. However, It’s extremely difficult to put this kind of interaction into expressions of math, that can then run, in a Numerical Weather or Climate model.

So how can the plight of our life giving oceans be brought to the attention of the public?

Many have said that it was Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth that finally did that for climate change. I’m not completely convinced this was the best way to do it.  For some reason, those who deny climate change, just cannot stand Al Gore!

If you go to a web site about climate, and it says something about Al Gore in the first paragraph, you are very unlikely to be getting science. Just politics. I really wonder if Al Gore was not associated with Climate change, would these people be less skeptical. Probably.

The same is true for emails I receive when I write, or air something on climate change. Complainers will inevitably mention Gore in the first paragraph, and usually the first line!  In truth, the results have been good, and Gore does an admirable job (IMHO) of explaining the science in the film.

I actually had a chance to see the beginnings of his movie. In 1997 I was invited along with some other Meteorologists to the White House. After Meeting both President Clinton and V.P. Gore, we went to the East Room, and Mr. Gore spent 45 mins. talking about climate with slides and all. I told my wife at the time, that Al Gore missed his calling in life. He should have been a scientist! I had never seen a politician who “got science” so well!

Guess you could say he found his calling after all! I rarely mention Gore here, because it will guarantee a slew of emails. He would have made a great scientist though! (Heck, he already uses a Mac )

A new film is coming out about the oceans, and while I have not seen it, I hear very good things. The trailer is on you tube and I have embedded it below. The movie is called END OF THE LINE, and is about overfishing, and the general state of our oceans.

The oceans are absorbing about half of the CO2 we put into the atmosphere each year. At some point they are predicted to stop taking in as much. That will be bad news indeed if we do not switch away from fossil fuels.

Some recent papers are indicating that this slow down may very well be underway. The Oceans have also kept the globe from warming as much as it would have in the past century. Eventually that heat will come back out. About a another degree.  If you have already seen the movie, drop me an email!

Yes there really is such a thing and you can join too. I warn you, a membership card will mark your final descent into geek-dom. So clean the screen on your Mac, and dust off your entire collection of Doctor Who episodes, and accept the fact you’re a geek and be happy about it. I am!

There is actually some big news in the cloud world as of late. There is a new one! Not world, we still have the same one, and it’s ecosystem is in a very iffy state. What we do have is a new cloud type. Maybe.

The Royal Meteorological Society is working with the founder of the cloud appreciation society (CAP) to get it recognized officially by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) of the UN. I think they have a pretty good chance too. I myself have seen them and could not identify them either! They are very beautiful and memorable.

The working name is ASPERATUS. Latin for rough and they do indeed appear rough! You can see an example of the cloud on the image below. Click to go to the CAP website.

Asperatus? Is the cloud of the month at the Cloud App. Society. Image is hyperlinked.

Cloud types are not that hard to learn. Here is an easy way to do it.

4 main categories:
1. Low 2. Middle 3. High 4. Tall
Each of these categories can have flat clouds or puffy clouds. Flat clouds are status. Puffy are cumulus. Middle clouds have the prefix Alto. High cloud has the prefix Cirro. There is only one tall cloud, a cumulonimbus. Commonly called a thunderhead and it is indeed likely a thunderstorm, or about to be one! Sometimes you will see a low cloud that seems to be a bit of stratus and cumulus together. Call it stratocumulus and you will likely be right.

One last thing. If it’s producing rain, add the word NIMBUS. Nimbus means rain cloud. As in cumulonimbus!  So a puffy middle cloud is an alto-cumulus and a high thin flat cloud is a cirrostratus. (I pronounce it cirro stray tus.)

Flying Saucer Lenticularis- Click image for more at Sci. Ray.

My favourite type of cloud is a LENNY. Technically it’s an Alto-cumulus Standing Lenticularis. (ACSL). They sometimes look like flying saucers hovering over a mountain top. There was a great display around Mount Rainier recently. Lennies are caused by invisible waves in the atmosphere. As air rises and cools, at the top of the wave, it may condense and form a cloud. As it descends, the air warms, and the cloud disappears. The visible part of the cloud will tend to stand over one spot!

173232main_noctilucent_clouds_nasa-webv_1

The link here is a great time lapse of these clouds from NASA.

Noctilucent Clouds- from NASA See description. Click image for more.

There is actually another type of cloud. Very rare, and very high. So high, it’s in the Mesosphere between 45-80km high. At the edge of space itself.

Noctilucent clouds are seen usually in the polar regions after dark. They are so high, that they can be lit by the sun, after it’s totally night at the surface. NASA is studying them with the AIM satellite. Check out the movie. I think I have seen Noctilucent clouds once, but I cannot say for sure.

The Mesosphere is the least explored part of our atmosphere. It’s extremely difficult to get there! You can pass rapidly through it on the shuttle heading into orbit, but you are there only for seconds. Too high for balloons and planes!

Some recent research is indicating that an increase in the appearances of these clouds may be due to climate change. While the troposphere is warming, the layers of the atmosphere above it are predicted to be cooling. That very thing is happening.

Clouds are the great leveler. Rich or poor, we can all see them and there is no charge. Those who live in the haze free areas of the world away from air pollution are the luckiest, and your chance of seeing Noctilucent clouds is much higher in polar regions. Lennies are very rare outside of mountain regions, but I have spotted them even here in the Southeast in winter.

These Cirrus aren't Near us. Click for details from NASA JPL.

Earth does not have a lock on clouds, with Venus covered in clouds made of sulfuric acid. Jupiter has clouds made of methane and Saturn’s moons Titan is also covered in exotic clouds. There has even been speculation that life might exist in the Jovian clouds, at just the right pressures and temperatures.

Yes, Mars has cirrus clouds!  They are made of ice crystals and look just like our cirrus.

I love clouds so much, I frequently show pictures, that viewers send me, on my daily weathercasts.

So look up in wonder every now and then!

Later,
Dan