Articles

The AMS Weather Band is taking a deep dive on weather instruments with the experts themselves! Join us and take your weather observing to the next level. 

Through May, June, and July 2021, Davis, WeatherFlow, Maximum, Pasco and Ambient will offer a series of live webinars and Q&A sessions in the online Weather Band community. They will provide overviews of their products and discuss which instruments are best for different purposes, from beginning weather observers to advanced users. 

Webinars require advance registration, but are open to everyone. The Q&A sessions in the community are available to Weather Band members only. Replays of the live webinars will be posted for all Weather Band members to watch on demand. Replays of the live webinars will be posted for all Weather Band members to watch on demand.

Thank you for your patience as we worked to reschedule this webinar!

On July 29 at 12:30 PM EDT/9:30 AM PDT, representatives from Ambient, Kestrel, and RainWise will join the AMS Weather Band to discuss their weather instruments, data dashboards, and more.

You can register here for the live event. And if you're a Weather Band member, you'll be able to watch the replay on demand.

Get a whole new understanding of weather through this fascinating talk from Professor Christopher Skinner of the University of Massachusetts Lowell! 

Plants move more water each day than the discharge of all the rivers in the world combined. How does that impact our weather and climate? And how do our own interactions with plants change weather and climate? 

Join Michael Naughton and Colin Busby from Neilsen-Kellerman as they discuss weather products from Ambient, Kestrel, and RainWise; how those brands came to coexist under one company; and how to make the most of whichever system you have, whether it's for professional or home use. 

Here are a few of the news stories from the weather and atmospheric sciences world that we've been following this week. Do you have a story we missed? Share it in the community!

The earliest origins of radar meteorology are difficult to uncover. The secrecy surrounding radar in World War II delayed reporting about technological breakthroughs until 1945 and later. But as far as can be determined, radio-location technology was fairly similar across different nations at the outbreak of the war. British work was slightly more advanced, largely due to the efforts of Sir Robert A. Watson-Watt. A Scottish physicist and meteorologist, Watson-Watt was a fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society by 1915, published a paper on radio waves created by lightning in 1922, and delivered the Symons Memorial Lecture in 1929 on ‘‘Weather and Wireless.’’ 

This high energy conversation between Bruckner Chase and Weather-Ready Nation's Doug Hilderbrand focuses on beach and coastline safety and forecasting. Bruckner is an internationally renowned adventure-athlete, ocean advocate, and resident expert for NOAA Ocean and Coastal Safety campaigns. You'll get a taste of what it means to be a weather expert at and for the ocean, and get an inside look at the lifeguard mindset by learning more about what to look for to stay safe at the beach, how to forecast and plan for hazards, and what the major hazards might be in different weather conditions.

In this fascinating and informative talk, Dr. Victor Gensini of Northern Illinois University walks through the environmental forces behind tornadoes and hail, how climate change is impacting severe weather, and how we can better predict severe weather across various time scales. 

We had a lot of questions about attribution science during Victor Gensini’s recent webinar on severe storms and their prediction and analysis. He does talk about attribution science in the webinar, but if you’re interested in a few more basics, and the process of attributions, check out this article on attribution science and how it works. 

Here are a few of the news stories from the weather and atmospheric sciences world that we've been following this week. Do you have a story we missed? Share it in the community!

Where Ida got its fuel

As Hurricane Ida headed into the Gulf of Mexico, a team of scientists was monitoring a large pool of warm water that swirled directly in its path. An oceanographer from that team breaks down how the Loop Current helped turn Hurricane Ida into such a gigantic storm, and how he monitors the oceans in order to help with severe weather prediction. 

An in-depth look at the Fennec Automatic Weather Station (AWS) Network: how researchers built a climate monitoring system in one of the harshest environments on earth

As the world’s largest desert, the Sahara is known for climatic extremes—temperature and aridity are the two most obvious. But it’s also known for airborne dust. A lot of dust. The Sahara is the single greatest annual source of airborne mineral dust in the world, blanketing the Caribbean and North America with haze. 

Join Derek Arndt, Director of the Center for Weather & Climate at National Centers for Environmental Information and AMS Councilmember, for a presentation on NOAA’s new climate normals and what that means for weather forecasting, agricultural decisions, and much more! 

In the fall of 1926, the U.S. Weather Bureau announced that radio weather reports were beginning to come in from the northernmost station in the United States: Point Barrow (now Nuvuk), Alaska. But few people would have guessed that the observer at this farthest north weather station was a young woman. Mrs. Beverly A. Morgan and her husband -  the Army Signal Corps radio operator - were two of only a few white inhabitants of the town, which was the coldest and most inaccessible station at that time: 450 miles north of other radio weather outposts. 

September 15, 2021
3:00 to 4:00 PM ET
Register Here

Part of the National Academy of Sciences Climate Conversations

Climate Change: Extreme Events

Note: This is not an AMS Weather Band event, but we identified this as a subject that may be of interest to Weather Band members. If you attend, let us know what you thought in the Weather Band Community!

As a result of climate change, extreme events such as floods, wildfires, storms, and heat waves are already becoming more dangerous and destructive. Marshall Shepherd (University of Georgia) will moderate a conversation with Craig Fugate (former FEMA Administrator) and Marissa Aho (Washington State Department of Natural Resources) about the connections between climate change and extreme events, and about how communities and governments at different scales can plan for and become more resilient to the risks from extreme events today and into the future.

Join the AMS Weather Band for a talk from Jared Rennie of the North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies!

His recent research analyzes and expands on the current understanding of extreme heat events. This presentation looks at how extreme heat events are classified; how heat waves impact human health; what meteorological data besides temperature matter most for understanding heat impacts; and what different warning products can be created to help people avoid severe impacts.

Here are a few of the news stories from the weather and atmospheric sciences and space that we've been following the last two weeks. Do you have a story we missed? Share it in the community!

Higher waves in the Arctic create ice-containing clouds

A team of scientists led by Dr. Jun Inoue of the National Institute of Polar Research, Japan, sought to answer a peculiar question: can higher waves in the Arctic Sea promote the development of ice-containing clouds? This question may seem strange at first, because most people would not have fathomed that a link could exist between those two natural phenomena. But the findings of this study indicate that there most likely is a connection. 

Weather spotters play an important role in the severe weather warning system. Since the 1970s, the National Weather Service (NWS) has trained citizens to collect, confirm, verify, or supplement radar and other data, thus, “serving as the nation’s first line of defense against severe weather.” Today, “SKYWARN,” is a volunteer program with over 350,000 trained spotters. The network includes police and fire personnel, 911 dispatchers, emergency management workers, public utility workers, and other concerned citizens.

Here are a few of the news stories from the weather and atmospheric sciences and space that we've been following in the last week. Do you have a story we missed? Share it in the community!

NASA’s Delta-X mission helps with disaster response after Hurricane Ida

Charged with studying the Mississippi River Delta, NASA’s Delta-X project was gearing up to collect data on Louisiana’s coastal wetlands when Hurricane Ida barreled ashore in late August. The storm – a high-end Category 4 when it made landfall near Port Fourchon, Louisiana, on August 29 – damaged buildings and infrastructure alike, resulting in power outages, flooding, and oil slicks in the Gulf of Mexico.

“How accurate is your data?” 

This is one of the big, never ending, unresolved questions around using and interpreting atmospheric data. Of course uncertainties have existed and will continue to exist in all forms of environmental data. But in order to understand our weather history, and our weather future, there is a need to define, measure, and understand these uncertainties. 

Here are a few of the news stories that we've been following in the last week. Do you have a story we missed? Share it in the community!

We are excited to announce the AMS Weather Band's first Community and Citizen Science Symposium!

Please join us as a speaker or a participant for this two day, virtual event, that will showcase citizen and community science projects and programs related to weather and the atmospheric sciences. It will take place on Friday, January 21, and Saturday, January 22 12:00 - 5:00 ET.

Rainbows occupy an important place in mythology, culture, and language all over the world. They also helped inspire advances in physics, mathematics, and understanding the nature of light!

Technically, you can only see a rainbow when the sun is behind your head and drops of water are in the air. The water drops might be from a rain shower, a waterfall, or even the spray from a water gun. Explore the infographic below for more rainbow facts. 

It wasn’t clear when Mary Breed Hawley married Carl Edgar Myers in 1871, that by the end of the century they would be one of the powerhouse couples of early aeronautics and create a revolution in American ballooning.