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The Great New England Hurricane of 1938 undoubtedly IS the one to which all other New England hurricanes are sooner or later compared. There have only been three others of comparable combined strength and widespread devastation since the colonization of the region.

To scientists who study them, there are two mysteries surrounding hurricanes that stand above the rest: Why do they exist at all, and why aren’t there many more of them? This may strike you as a paradox, but these are serious questions that arise when burrowing deep into the theory, modeling, and observations of these storms. And they bear on the question posed by the title of this essay.

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! 

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.

Today we rely so heavily on satellite imagery for understanding, predicting, and maintaining life-safety in weather, that it's hard to imagine a world without it. But until the 1960s, there was no satellite imagery, let alone the richly colored images of atmospheric movement that we see everyday.

In addition to his well known and groundbreaking work on tornadoes and aviation safety, Tetsuya Theodore (Ted) Fujita was a pioneer in using satellite imagery to understand and analyze atmospheric motion. He created methods for analyzing satellite images that allowed observers to accurately diagnose wind movement using pictures from the early Television Infrared Observation Satellite (TIROS) launches. He also developed laboratory techniques that facilitated cloud motion analysis.

Photography has been an important tool in the atmospheric sciences since it was invented, and as photography advanced, so too did the quality of weather observations. The very first color photograph of the earth from a satellite came from the U.S. Air Force's DODGE satellite that was launched in 1967.

The belief that weather influences people's health has been prevalent for millennia. Recent studies on the relationship between weather and pain for those who suffer from chronic pain remain indeterminate, with some studies finding strong effects and others finding no effects; most studies face limitations to their study design or dataset size. To address these limitations, a U.K.-wide smartphone study Cloudy with a Chance of Pain was conducted over 15 months with 10,584 citizen scientists who suffer from chronic pain, producing the largest dataset both in duration and number of participants.

Tanja Fransen's presentation from the 2022 AMS Community and Citizen Science Symposium covers the increasing issues with wildfire smoke intrusions and public health and how a Weather Ready Nation needs to include partners in the public health arenas.  

Meningitis epidemics have a devastating impact on the region and its people. Even with treatment, the fatality rate can exceed 10%, and 10%–20% of survivors experience long-term after effects including brain damage and hearing loss. Meningitis can push a family into severe poverty, which is especially significant in a region where the annual per capita income ranges from US$500 to US$1500. Weather forecasting can play a significant role in vaccination campaigns and prioritize where vaccines should be delivered. 

In an average year, high temperatures kill more people in the United States than all other weather-related phenomena combined (NOAA 2016), and in New York City two-thirds of heat-related deaths occur at home. Those most at risk are the ill and elderly, who tend to be home throughout the day. Yet few studies capture indoor residential temperatures in non-air-conditioned homes. 

Douglas Dockery from the Harvard Chan School of Medicine covers 50 years of air pollution history and research in this fascinating talk. This includes a look at how energy production and the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s impacted human health and pollution research, and why the focus on PM2.5 particulates came to be. 

Hippocrates (circa 400 BCE) wrote in On Airs, Waters, and Places that diseases had seasonal cycles and the health of city dwellers was affected by prevailing wind directions. Such ideas persisted until the eighteenth century. Today, a common belief among three-quarters of patients who suffer from chronic pain is that their daily pain levels fluctuate with the weather.

In this presentation from the 2022 AMS Community and Citizen Science Symposium, Candice Erdmann describes how, during a severe windstorm on Labor Day 2020, several wildfires began to tear through parts of the Oregon Cascades Range. This includes a discussion of the topography, air quality monitors used, and data verification processes.

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!