Tag: weather

Ball lightning

Now that we’re finally starting to see some hot weather, it won’t be long before we begin to see something else: thunderstorms and lightning (very, very frightening me! Galileo, Galileo…sorry, just a little Queen flashback). It’s the lightning, of course, that makes thunderstorms thunder. If I may quote myself from a previous column, lightning “is …

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Weather on the Web

Here’s this week’s CBC Web column… Audio version here. ***** The weather is perennially fascinating. We check the forecast first thing in the morning. We check the weather in cities we might be visiting on business or vacation. And northerners heading south for a bit of sun pay particular attention to the hurricane forecasts. Once …

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Aha! I knew I had a good reason not have an iPod!

The headphones can conduct electricity into your head if you’re struck–or nearly struck–by lightning! Talk about music that will “blow your mind”…

Photo of the Day: Thundercloud

More photos here.

Electrifying development:

Ball lighting may have been explained at last–and created artificially in the laboratory! Key segment: A more down-to-earth theory, proposed by John Abrahamson and James Dinniss at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, is that ball lightning forms when lightning strikes soil, turning any silica in the soil into pure silicon vapour. As …

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If Astana, Kazakhstan, can do it…

…why can’t Regina, Saskatchewan? Heck, if you squint, the two names are practically identical. “It,” in this case, is cover 100,000 square metres of downtown space with a giant, semi-transparent, climate-controlled tent. (Shades of the domed cities so beloved of old-time science fiction writers.) To whit: The Khan Shatyry entertainment centre in Astana will become …

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Adapting to the cold

Every January, we residents of Saskatchewan ask ourselves the same question: why are we here, instead of in the tropics? There’s a scientific version of that same question: how have humans, who evolved in the tropics, managed to survive in the even-icier-than-Saskatchewan climes of the far north? The January 9 edition of the scientific journal …

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Dust devils

You see them mostly on hot, dry days, weaving along the edges of fallow fields: tall, snaking columns of whirling dust. They’re dust devils, and they’re coming under increasing study: not so much because of their effects on Earth but because they’ve also been seen on Mars, where they may threaten future landers. Even on …

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Ice

Ice is an inescapable fact of life in Canada every winter.  It makes roads and sidewalks slippery, bursts pipes, cracks pavements, heaves ground. It can bring down trees and power lines and even airplanes. And yet, if ice didn’t have the special properties that make it sometimes destructive and almost always a nuisance, two vitally …

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Floods

Seven years ago, it was the Mississippi. Three years ago, it was the Red River. Two years ago, the Yangtze River in China. This year, Mozambique. Recent years have seen a, well, a flood of devastating floods all around the world. And they’re getting worse. In 1998, total losses from weather-related natural disasters, including floods …

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Lightning and humans

Being struck by lightning is one of those occurrences we consider highly unlikely. How often have you said, “You’re more likely to be struck by lightning than… (fill in the blank–win the lottery, for example). But for a surprising number of people every year, the unlikely becomes all too real. The National Weather Service in …

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Clouds

Cloud-watching is a favorite pastime of prairie people, probably because you can see them coming a long way off (clouds, that is, not people). “Nasty looking clouds over there,” we say, or “Looks like snow clouds blowing in,” or “I see a puppy dog. What do you see?” Whether you’re using clouds to forecast the …

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