Starship Asterisk*

geckzilla wrote:You could always cool off like a kangaroo. Dig a little hole to lay in under a bush or tree and lick your forearms all over.

geckzilla wrote:
Hah, meteors are like cockroaches, then. You see one, there must be more lurking... Expert Chris Peterson dispels the myth! Well, sort of, anyway.

http://www.kktv.com/news/headlines/Poss ... 95025.html

TNT wrote:
For the past 10 days I was camping with Troop 199 in the Boy Scouts of America and others in the Heart of America Council at H. Roe Bartle Scout Reservation. The only time it rained was on the morning of June 22, and only that morning. For the rest of the time the heat index was at least 100 degrees with the added humidity. The inside of the tents were like ovens.

• The heat was in tents?

neufer wrote:

• The heat was in tents?

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=78394 wrote:

---

[b][color=#0000FF]Heat Wave Fuels Wildfires in the Rockies (June 17 - 24, 2012) Based upon MODIS on NASA’s Terra satellite[/color][/b]

---

<<On June 28, 2012, wildfires raged across the western United States. The Waldo Canyon fire in Colorado attracted the most attention after spreading into Colorado Springs and charring hundreds of homes, but large wildfires also burned throughout Utah, Wyoming, Montana, New Mexico, and Arizona.

A lack of winter snow cover and ongoing drought primed vegetation in these states for ignition. But in recent weeks, another ingredient for extreme wildfire emerged: heat. High temperatures dry out vegetation and decrease the relative humidity, making it easier for fires to ignite and spread.

Land surface temperatures (LST) are distinct from the air temperatures that meteorological stations typically measure. LSTs indicate how hot the surface of the Earth would feel to the touch. From a satellite vantage point, the “surface” includes a number of materials that capture and retain heat, such as desert sand, the dark roof of a building, or the pavement of a road. As a result, daytime land surface temperatures are usually higher than air temperatures.

This heat wave, like all extreme weather events, has its direct cause in a complex set of atmospheric conditions that produce short-term weather. However, weather occurs within the broader context of the climate, and there’s a high level of agreement among scientists that global warming has made it more likely that heat waves of this magnitude will occur.>>

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=78389 wrote:

---

[b][color=#0000FF]Aerosols on June 26, 2012 from the Ozone Mapper Profiler Suite (OMPS) on the new Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (S-NPP) satellite[/color][/b]

---

<<Along the Rocky Mountain range, there has been a dearth of snow cover, insect stress in the forests, and a hot spring that has turned into a hot summer. The result by late June 2012 was a surplus of smoke from many dangerous fires raging across the western United States.

The map above depicts the relative concentration of aerosols in the skies above the continental United States on June 26, 2012. The map was assembled from data acquired by the Ozone Mapper Profiler Suite (OMPS) on the new Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (S-NPP) satellite. Aerosol are tiny solid and liquid particles that have an outsized impact on weather and climate. Their concentrations are represented above in shades of red and yellow, with the highest concentrations in deep red and the lowest in light yellow. Grays represent clouds or areas where no reliable data were available.

In addition to measuring ozone levels in the atmosphere, OMPS can track aerosols (such as smoke particles) as they are lofted and transported by winds. The instrument measures the light scattered and reflected by the atmosphere. Specifically, it observes the difference between the amount of ultraviolet (UV) light the smoke- and dust-filled atmosphere scatters back to the satellite compared to the amount of UV the atmosphere would scatter back if skies were clear.

In the image, the aerosol signal is strong to the north and east of the North Schell, Dump, and Wood Hollow fires in Nevada and Utah. Thick smoke plumes from wildfires across Colorado moved east and south into the plains states. Further south in Texas, New Mexico, and Mexico, it is unclear if the aerosols were blown in from distant fires, if there is local burning, or if they are dust storms, which are also a result of hot, dry, and windy weather.>>

owlice wrote:The storm was a derecho.