Rashid's Blog: A Place for Inquisitive Souls

(Image source: GOES/NOAA)

Today, a very muscular blocking high pressure system located over the Western US flexed. After having set off record fires and heat waves it reached deep into the Arctic and drew moisture and more unstable air down from over Hudson Bay across the Rockies and over top of Arizona and New Mexico, igniting powerful thunderstorms which blanketed large areas in hail, heavy rainfall and lightning. A second moisture stream drawn into the high’s circulation from the Pacific also fed these storms.

You can see the bright, high, cold cloud tops now firing over Arizona and New Mexico.

To the east, an upper level low pressure system is just now starting to draw this concentrated moisture into two other feeding, damp air flows. The largest draws straight up from the Caribbean over Florida and then rushes up the US East Coast. The second, pulls moisture from tropical…

The advent of satellite imagery opened our eyes to many unseen aspects of the airflow in the atmosphere which had been invisible to most scientific instruments. It gave us the possibility to trace the transportation of moisture from tropical regions to the higher latitudes. Further, we could integrate the amount of the water vapour throughout the depth of the troposphere (lowest layer of the Earth’s atmosphere) everywhere, especially over the oceans. The latter approach proved to be an invaluable tool to discover a weather phenomenon called “atmospheric river”.

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Has your Facebook account ever been suspended?  Well mine is – since February, after only being there for five months:  I was offered by Facebook a whole bunch of people to choose friends from. Oh, nice, I thought, and selected everyone who looked friendly. Only days later I received an email, that my account is suspended for a month as FB’s rules were broken:  you can only choose friends you know personally.  But hey, why on earth did they contact me in the first place, and offered me to choose “friends” ???

Since then, every time I log in, they prompt me to identify people from a photo album, which often consists of cats, vacation scenes, jewelry and yes, also people at parties or riding on a bike. “Sorry Facebook, but I have no clue who’s cat that is, and I am not able to remember everyone’s name…