Techdirt. Stories filed under "weather"

Techdirt. Stories filed under "weather" Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us Techdirt. Stories filed under "weather"http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Tue, 9 Oct 2012 17:00:00 PDT DailyDirt: More Clouds & Rainbows Michael Ho http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101007/10191111325/dailydirt-more-clouds-rainbows.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101007/10191111325/dailydirt-more-clouds-rainbows.shtml chemtrail conspiracy theories, we can document weird-looking patterns in the sky and try to figure out how/why they happen. Here are just a few examples of some crowdsourced meteorology.

The International Cloud Atlas is considering including pictures of wavy clouds, called undulatus asperatus and documented by the Cloud Appreciation Society (CAS). These wavy clouds could be the first new type of cloud added to the official cloud record since 1951. [url]
Here's a gallery of a variety of rainbows and some other cool-looking artifacts of the sky (eg. fogbows and sundogs). If cute pictures can increase worker productivity, maybe rainbows can, too. [url]
Pretty clouds make for great pictures, but they might also precede some pretty bad weather. Actinoform clouds can only be seen properly from space, as they spread over a hundred miles across the sky. [url]

Ice flowers are a delicate formation of ice crystals made under windless conditions when supersaturated water vapor above sea ice condenses into dendritic ice crystals. Ice flowers are a natural phenomenon -- typically seen early in the morning. [url]

An art project called 'Pi in the Sky' printed the first thousand digits of pi using 5 'skytyping' planes at about 10,000 feet in the air -- probably not quite high enough to form a cloud of ice crystals, but it was still cool looking. Cirrus clouds which are mostly ice crystals form at slightly higher altitudes (around 18,000 feet or higher), but skywriting-skytyping planes actually spray paraffin oil to form their messages. [url]

The "icicle of death" (also known as a "brinicle") is made of freezing water that occurs as cold, dense salt water sinks through less salty sea water. The frozen brine can kill sea urchins and starfish when it touches them on the sea floor. [url]

San Francisco enjoyed a nice double rainbow last week. Is that a total of four pots of gold? [url]
Iridescent clouds are sometimes called fire rainbows, and they're beautifully-colored clouds caused by the diffraction of light through water droplets of uniform size. Neither fire, nor rainbow. Discuss. [url]
A picture of a storm brewing in Brunei has been spreading all over the internet. If only there was a way to combine cute kittens and big scary clouds.... [url]
A "roll cloud" in Brazil looks pretty scary as it tumbles across the sky, but it's actually pretty harmless. Lots of strange cloud formations are caused by weird wind patterns that stir up warm, moist air with cooler air pockets. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

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]]> urls-we-dig-up http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20091111/1334536901 Mon, 23 Jan 2012 17:00:00 PST DailyDirt: Don't Just Talk About The Weather... Michael Ho http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100311/0052398517/dailydirt-talk-about-weather.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100311/0052398517/dailydirt-talk-about-weather.shtml are some people trying to control the weather. (And global climate change could be an inadvertent way that people are changing the weather, too.) So there are a lot of big problems that look unsolvable, but maybe if enough people work on them, we'll find solutions. Here are just some quick examples.

NASA could make it rain when it tested space shuttle rocket engines in the wetlands of Mississippi. Hydrogen fuel burned with oxygen produces water, but just adding water to the atmosphere doesn't necessarily produce a rainstorm. [url]
China tried to control the weather around Beijing before the Summer Olympics of 2008. "Tried" is perhaps the key word, since weather modification isn't quite an exact science just yet. But then again, it didn't rain during the opening and closing ceremonies in 2008.... [url]
Geoengineering climate change is even more ambitious -- and potentially dangerous. But given that the world hasn't stopped its CO2 emissions, it doesn't really hurt to put together some plans for correcting our atmospheric mistakes (whether or not they'll be needed). [url]
To find some more bizarre/odd stuff, check out some things that other StumbleUpon users have found. [url]

By the way, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

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