#Thunder and lightning in december how to
This implied that the storms, which can stretch for miles, should have enormous total electric potentials of around a gigavolt, or the equivalent of nearly a billion AA batteries.īut measuring voltage across an object usually requires placing two wires at either end, and nobody had figured out how to do that for a large and amorphous thing like a cloud. Gupta wondered if that property could be used to calculate how much energy the thunderclouds contained.īack in 1929, Nobel prize-winning physicist Charles Thomson Rees Wilson measured the electric field inside a thundercloud and found it to be a surprisingly large 12,700 volts per inch. Muons carry negative charge, meaning their paths are distorted by electric fields. “We were studying high-energy cosmic rays and interplanetary space, and not so much the thunderstorms.” Packing a punch “This was more of an amusing episode for us than anything serious,” says study coauthor Sunil Gupta, a high-energy physicist at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India, whose team described their work last month in Physical Review Letters. Residents reportedly watched the tornado from afar as it moved across nearby mountains.Please be respectful of copyright. The most recent tornado report from Alaska came from Sand Point, a small town on an island near the beginning of the Aleutian Island chain. The residents of Alaska have reported a whopping four tornadoes since reliable records began in 1950, none of which produced notable damage. Tornadoes are even less common in Alaska, with the three National Weather Service offices in the state holding the distinction of being the only offices out of the 100+ in the 50 states that have never before issued a tornado warning. We have the same problem in some parts of the lower 48, though to a lesser extent. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to see it, the damage goes unreported to the National Weather Service and we’ll never know for sure if the storm was indeed severe. Radar coverage in The Last Frontier is about as sparse as its population, so if a storm doesn’t form near one of the cities covered by this lifesaving technology, forecasters only have eyes on the ground and satellite imagery to keep track of it.Īlaska averages a couple of severe thunderstorm warnings every year, though it’s hard to verify if the warned storms actually produced severe weather (and if any unwarned storms produced severe weather) due to the state’s sparsely-populated nature. Most of the warnings are concentrated around Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Bethel. To put that in perspective, the NWS office that serves the area around Boston, Massachusetts, has issued 78 severe thunderstorm warnings between January 1 and July 28 of this year. Mersereau, Data: IEM/NWSĭata pulled from the Iowa Environmental Mesonet-a treasure trove of weather data-shows that the National Weather Service offices in Anchorage and Fairbanks have collectively issued 55 severe thunderstorm warnings since 2002, four of those warnings going up within the last two months. Severe thunderstorm warnings issued in the State of Alaska between 20. This month also saw the all-time record warmest temperature ever recorded so close to the Arctic Ocean when a small town in far northern Alaska reached a daytime high of 84☏. The city has recorded highs of 80☏ or warmer 10 times since June 1 average highs in Fairbanks range from the upper 60s in June to the mid-70s in July. Fairbanks, a city that’s geographically planted just right of center in the state’s otherwise unpopulated wilderness, recorded two high temperatures of 88☏ earlier this month. Much of the state recently endured a stretch of temperatures you’d more commonly see in Minnesota than in Alaska. When you do think of Alaska, your first thought likely conjures up images endless cold and snow interrupted by a small window of comfortable weather.ĭespite its reputation, parts of Alaska can get pretty toasty during the summer. Separated from us by an entire country and broken off, shrunk, and shoved into the bottom-left corner of most maps, Alaska is undeservedly an afterthought for many Americans. It’s easy to forget about Alaska even though it’s by far the largest of the 50 states.
0 kommentar(er)
