Starship Asterisk*

Chris Peterson wrote:

neufer wrote:Nevertheless... it is a good idea to avoid eating the yellow to orangish-red snow when in Antarctica:

Well, if I ever get the urge to eat orangish-red snow... glowing orangish-red snow, just think of it as an example of evolution in action.

geckzilla wrote:

Chris Peterson wrote:

neufer wrote:Nevertheless... it is a good idea to avoid eating the yellow to orangish-red snow when in Antarctica:

Well, if I ever get the urge to eat orangish-red snow... glowing orangish-red snow, just think of it as an example of evolution in action.

I'm pretty sure you would turn into an actual Yeti with superpowers if you did that.

Beyond wrote:Hot tea and -40C.
http://petapixel.com/2015/12/22/heres-a ... c-weather/

Beyond wrote:Hot tea and -40C.
http://petapixel.com/2015/12/22/heres-a ... c-weather/

Ann wrote:That's a fine arc of tea, Beyond. But I'm not sure it's my cuppa.

Ann

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=87324 wrote:

[b][color=#0000FF][size=110]Hurricane Alex on January 14, 2016, by MODIS on NASA’s Terra satellite[/size][/color][/b]

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An Atlantic Hurricane…in January
Earth Observatory, January 15, 2016

<<Hurricanes have arrived early this year in the northern hemisphere. Just days after hurricane Pali became the earliest Central Pacific hurricane on record, the Atlantic basin spun up its own unusual storm. On January 14, 2016, a tropical depression in the eastern Atlantic evolved into hurricane Alex; it became the earliest hurricane in the basin since 1938 and just the fourth January hurricane in 150 years of records.

The storm was about 800 kilometers (500 miles) south of the Azores, which it is predicted to pass over in the coming days. Alex is not just unusual for being a hurricane in the dead of winter; it is also unusual as just the second storm on record to form so far north and east in the Atlantic (north of 30 degrees North latitude, east of 30 degrees West longitude).>>

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNyKDI9pn0Q wrote:
<<The 1938 New England Hurricane (also referred to as the Great New England Hurricane and Long Island Express) was one of the deadliest and most destructive tropical cyclones to impact New England. The storm formed near the coast of Africa on September 9, becoming a Category 5 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale before making landfall as a Category 3 hurricane on Long Island on September 21. The hurricane was estimated to have killed 682 people, damaged or destroyed over 57,000 homes, and caused property losses estimated at US$306 million ($4.7 billion in 2016). It remains the most powerful and deadliest hurricane in recent New England history, eclipsed in landfall intensity perhaps only by the Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635.

In 1938 United States forecasting lagged behind forecasting in Europe, where new techniques of analyzing air masses and taking into account the influence of fronts were being used. A confidential report by the United States Forest Service, the parent agency of the United States Weather Bureau, had described the forecasting of the bureau as "a sorry state of affairs" where forecasters had poor training and systematic planning was not used and where forecasters had to "scrape by" to get information wherever they could.>>

geckzilla wrote:I'm sure the pile we made will be there for months. The stuff not in piles? Yeah, probably in a few days.

[img3="A simulation of the Antarctic ozone hole, made from data taken on October 22, 2015. (Credit: GSFC)"]http://news.mit.edu/sites/mit.edu.newso ... k=tcAve933[/img3][hr][/hr]

Scientists at MIT and elsewhere have identified the “first fingerprints of healing” of the Antarctic ozone layer, published today in the journal Science.

The team found that the September ozone hole has shrunk by more than 4 million square kilometers — about half the area of the contiguous United States — since 2000, when ozone depletion was at its peak. The team also showed for the first time that this recovery has slowed somewhat at times, due to the effects of volcanic eruptions from year to year. Overall, however, the ozone hole appears to be on a healing path.

The authors used “fingerprints” of the ozone changes with season and altitude to attribute the ozone’s recovery to the continuing decline of atmospheric chlorine originating from chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). These chemical compounds were once emitted by dry cleaning processes, old refrigerators, and aerosols such as hairspray. In 1987, virtually every country in the world signed on to the Montreal Protocol in a concerted effort to ban the use of CFCs and repair the ozone hole. ...

• Science (online 30 June 2016) DOI: 10.1126/science.aae0061