If you're wondering who's getting all the cold air the lower 48 states is missing during this non-winter of 2012, the answer during the past week has been Alaska. Our 49th state is used to intense winter cold, but not like what they've experienced during the past week. Friday night and Saturday night, temperatures plummeted to -50°F and -51°F in Fairbanks, marking the first time since 1999 the city had seen back-to-back minus fifty nights. The low temperature so far today at the Fairbanks International Airport has been -44°F, giving the city sixteen days of -40°F temperatures so far this month. Since 1906, there have only been three years (1906, 1934, and 1971) with more 40 below days during the month of January. At forty below zero, the air is so cold that the water vapor condenses out into ice crystals, which float in the air creating a low-visibility fog. A large area of Alaska experienced bitter cold temperatures of -50 to -65°F Sunday morning:
FORT YUKON CO-OP..............65 BELOW
KANDIK RIVER CO-OP............64 BELOW
FORT YUKON AIRPORT..........62 BELOW*
BETTLES.................................60 BELOW**
HUSLIA.....................................60 BELOW
MANLEY HOT SPRINGS............60 BELOW
NORTH POLE/WOODSMOKE....60 BELOW
CHICKEN CO-OP.....................59 BELOW
GALENA AIRPORT....................58 BELOW
TANANA...................................58 BELOW
CIRCLE HOT SPRINGS..........58 BELOW
DELTA 20 SE CO-OP...............58 BELOW
COLDFOOT................................57 BELOW
EAGLE CO-OP.........................57 BELOW
KALTAG...................................56 BELOW
GOLDSTREAM CREEK..........55 BELOW
ARCTIC VILLAGE..................54 BELOW
NENANA..................................54 BELOW
SALCHA..................................54 BELOW
FAIRBANKS AIRPORT..............51 BELOW
DELTA JUNCTION/FT GREELY......50 BELOW
LAKE MINCHUMINA.................50 BELOW
MCGRATH.................................50 BELOW
*TIED DAILY RECORD LOW OF 62 BELOW SET IN 1909
**EXCEEDS DAILY RECORD LOW OF 58 BELOW SET IN 1989
The cold snap is expected to continue through mid-week, with more -65°F temperatures possible in the interior valleys north of Fairbanks. Warmer air is expected to arrive state-wide by Thursday.
Figure 1. It's a tradition! Photo taken Sunday, January 29, 2012, by one of our more adventurous wunderphotographers. Image credit: wunderphotographer TerezkaSunshine.
All-time U.S. low temperature record threatened?
The coldest temperature ever recorded in the U.S. was a -80°F (-62.2°C) reading from Prospect Creek, AK (about 180 miles north of Fairbanks) on January 23, 1971. A weather station just a few miles from Prospect Creek, the Jim River DOT site, appears to have recorded a low temperature between -78°F and -79°F Saturday morning (January 28, 2012), shortly before the weather station lost power. Keeping the power going at -70 is very tough, and it is not a surprise to see that the station lost power during this extraordinary cold snap. Power just returned this morning to the site, where the temperature was -66°F at 7 am AKST. Wunderground's weather historian Christopher C. Burt is corresponding with Alaska's state climatologist to get more information on whether the data during the power outage will be recoverable, and how reliable these near-record low temperatures might be.
Jeff Masters
This capture was shot just outside of North Pole , Alaska. It was a very cold and slow night for aurora hunting. One of these days I will learn to leave earlier in the evening.
Looking due south down a side road, not too long after noon. Chilly night last night, down to -51.
This was shot at 0345 on 29, Jan. It was painfully cold.
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What kind of job you think you'll have when you are a grown up?
How's homeschooling anyways?
I was home schooled for a bit a year ago, but it wasn't long enough to evaluate the social downsides. Also, it wasn't my parents who taught me. A teacher came to my house because I couldn't go to school. I remember that month or so of homeschooling as one of the worst and best moments of my life, and I am who I am today because of that experience.
..click image for Loop
Drought May Cause Shutdown of Texas Rice Production
Although recent rains have put a dent in the Texas drought, a day of reckoning looms for the state’s long-grain rice growers, who pump millions into the economy in Southeast Texas each year and account for about 5 percent of America’s rice production. Come March 1, if there is less than 850,000 acre-feet of water in reservoirs along the Lower Colorado River, water managers will be forced to take the unprecedented step of withholding water from agricultural users, which will mean severe cuts to Texas rice production this year.
According to Bob Rose, chief meteorologist with the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA), it’s unlikely that enough rain will fall between now and March 1 to reach the 850,000 acre-feet threshold that was established by a recent agreement between the authority and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. An acre-foot is the amount of water required to cover one acre of land to a depth of one foot, and it amounts to about 326,000 gallons.
As of January 30, the highland lakes that serve as the area’s reservoirs held about 758,000 acre-feet.
"This is going to be a huge, huge deal," Rose said during a presentation at the annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society in New Orleans. "What’s going to happen is that there will be no water for agriculture in Texas this year."
Driving the Lower Colorado River Authority’s decision-making is the need to ensure there is enough water to meet the demand from Austin, the rapidly growing state capital that is completely reliant on water from the Lower Colorado River, as well as other municipalities and users, such as electric utilities that need water to run power plants.
Full article here.
ok if this is a question concernin my grammar and spelling, not ansering lol. i dont spell corect cuz im layed back. but i CAN spell and put proper grammar.
Meteorlologist...maybe Storm chaser:) i hope
my homeschool is on my computer, and doenst take long on regular days. got a playlist of bout 75 pop songs i listen to while working.
You never get Hydrogen burning in the outer layers of stars. It's possible that you can get a thin layer of hydrogen burning just outside the core of a helium burning star, which does make some small contribution to the total energy output of the star, and thus its size. This is known as the "shell burning" stage -- I kind of skipped it in my earlier explanation for brevity. In fact, stars that are creating iron in their cores can have multiple shells where different fusion processes are occurring -- think an onion.
.lol .taht od ot gniog erew uoy wenk I
Damn, that is the life. Would love to do that, oh well, only 2 more years of high school anyways. :P
lol. i have seen high school, and im glad im not part of all those teens...few of them i saw SMOKING. pants saggin, all that mess, lol.
The only bad thing about bein homeschooled is i dont ave any friends..
I have a few bones to pick with this. First of all, asteroseismology allows us to look into the center of stars, so we have a really good idea of what is going on in the interior of stars. They have done tests of hydrogen fusion both in laboratories and with nuclear weapons -- the processes and energy output are exactly as predicted. Moreover, if there were significant amounts of exotic materials on their, we would see them. We don't. If there were powerful, exotic methods of producing energy -- and there probably are, I'm not denying that -- but if they fueled stars, it would violate Ockham's Razor: if you have a simple explanation that seems to work (nuclear fusion), that's probably what is going on. Without additional observations that break the current theory, there's no reason to invoke anything more exotic.
Furthermore, the universe is full of things call global clusters. A global cluster is a dense cluster of stars where almost all the stars formed at about the same time. Therefore, what we see when we look at an individual star cluster is a snapshot in time of the lifetime of a star. By looking at many global clusters -- we know of thousands -- it's fairly trivial to reconstruct the life cycle of stars. Stars are created, they age, and they die. If stars lived as long as you postulated..... we wouldn't see them die!
The white hole explanation you provide doesn't really work. Why would we never see a naked white hole? Why does large amount of matter collect in white holes? IF they are giving off energy, you would expect matter to be forced away, without ever collecting. Do white holes only form where density is high enough? I suppose it's possible.... but then where do neutron stars come from? White dwarfs? Supernova? For a "model" to become accepted, it has to explain all observed phenomena. White holes don't. Fusion does. It may still not be right, so I can't say Q.E.D., but it's pretty damned airtight.
I'm as open-minded an astrophysicist as you'll ever encounter, with a strong familiarity with the philosophy of science, so I understand the concerns you are expressing and able to overlook your aggression. I too hate all this dark matter and dark energy and X number of collapsed dimensions. I personally detest this "science"... but rather than just complaining loudly, I'm actually looking into trying to construct an alternative... which might be a better use of your energy than ranting/trolling :).
Hey, at least you mentioned that, at least theoretically.
I couldn't even get a physicist to admit that much in the past.
I'll leave it alone for the fact it's a weather forum and all, its just cosmology is filled with a lot of people making the fallacy of mixing up theory with facts, and then citing one theory as "proof" of another theory, etc.
smoking is not healthy.
Studies show that living is not healthy.
[/joke about how studies say that everything is unhealthy]
Now yes, smoking is not healthy, and I do not wish to take part in it. But I believe he was implying something else.
Man's quest for knowledge can be noble and continues to be necessary to solve the challenges we face on this planet. But I believe that the most important quest for all of us is to know the Creator of all things knowable. -imho
No, no.
I think you missed the point entirely.
I wasn't making fun of anyone's profession.
Even professionals become blinded by the framework in which they exist. Look at wall street and the economists who were doing all the wrong things 4 or 5 years ago, and so forth. They all had degrees in economics, but they helped wreck the system.
Ok, just take Steve Jobs and Apple.
Why didn't some guy with a degree make Apple?
Why didn't some guy with a degree make Facebook?
It's called paradigm:
Entire fields of endeavour just stuck in a regime and completely failing to realize the real nature of the world around them, as well as the real applications of existing knowledge.
Steve Jobs was like, "Hey everyone else, stay here and do the same old crap if you like, I'll go start the next era in human history."
All the guys with degrees were too busy being yes men, or taking tests or writing their thesis, so that they could not be bothered with inventing the next revolution: Blind.
Ontology and Physics are two different things.
The Biblical philosophy was supposed to be that God's work was evident in creation. That creation pointed to God. It was never meant to be an excuse to stop critical thinking.
What I'm looking for from physics is a matrix of laws and principles that is actually consistent from top to bottom, without circular reasoning.
The existing paradigm does not accomplish that in the least.
I am very willing to believe that cosmology is a mess right now. There are many astrophysicists working both within the current paradigm and outside it, trying to find a more palatable solution, all the while we gather more and more observations. At some point, some person probably far more clever than me will crack it and we can move on. And I say this being well-acquainted with one of the people who won the Nobel prize this time around for dark energy.
Join or start a co-op, look on Yahoo. There's over 700 families in one of our local homeschool online groups. Somewhere around 20% of kids in Brevard County are homeschooled. People post what is going on & where everyone is meeting up~ parks, skating, Ripley's Believe it or Not. Go, find friends & learn. Saw Arc Attack this morning. Part of a group of shows that are put on at the local college performance center. The county has been busing public school kids to all of the half dozen shows so far this year but they weren't there today. Really informative & fun show on electricity. The only reason I can think they were missing was that part on Tesla & the Tesla Coil. They don't teach about Tesla in the public schools here anymore, he's completely left out.
Report: “High level radiation cloud” detected passing over New Zealand city — Peaks reached an “incredible” 1.89 microSv/h
Source: Peter Daley
Date: 29th January 2012
I have been in contact with a person In New Zealand who just sent me information of a detection of a high level radiation cloud passing over Dunedin New Zealand. You will find a copy of his email correspondence below. This chart is the recorded background radiation level during this event. Visual observation saw peaks reach an incredible 1.89 uS/Hr !
Read complete report.....[...] Link
Published: January 31st, 2012 at 09:43 AM EDT By Enenews
Rare quake hits near troubled Illinois nuke plant releasing radioactive steam — “That’s right, she said earthquake” (VIDEO)
Title: Magnitude 2.4 – ILLINOIS
Source: USGS
Date: January 30, 2012 at 09:54:43 PM
Location: 42.340°N, 88.243°W
Title: Earthquake rattles northern suburbs, parts of Wis.
Source: ABC 7
Date: Jan 31, 2012 at 07:50 AM CT
If you live in the north or northwest suburbs and felt the ground move Monday night, you were not dreaming. A small earthquake centered near northwest suburban McHenry hit just before 10 p.m.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) National Earthquake Information Center, the 2.4-magnitude earthquake hit at 9:54 p.m. about two miles east of McHenry, Ill.
The earthquake was given an intensity rating of 3, which means it was weak. Still, more than 300 people reported on the USGS website that they felt it.
Experts say the earthquake was felt from southeast Wisconsin to northern Illinois to northwest Indiana. [...]
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