Science+Afternoon+2

=**March 26, 2009 Science Afternoon at NIST**=

Sky Writers
===//"The sky is mixed, but there is some blue, and the motion of skating, and the lightness and coldness of the air involve quite clearly for me a beauty, a moral beauty." //===

Seeing the Skies
There are literally a rainbow of colors that reach our eyes from the skies on any one day. The light that reaches the rods and cones of our eyes, comes from scattered light. Dust, salt, air molecules and water droplets scatter the colors of light from clouds in different ways. The two primary methods for scattering light from the sun are Rayleigh scattering resulting in blue skies and Mie scattering resulting in the shades of white to grey colors of clouds. A Georgia State University [|web site] explains the mechanics of the scattering techniques and offers an intriguing technique to use your laptop to analyze colors from digital pictures.

Weather Map Analysis
A revolutionary method of weather map analysis and interpretation evolved in Norway before and during WWI principally by Vilhelm and his son, Jacob Bjerknes. The Bergen Norway School of weather analysis based its approach on the Polar Front Theory of J. Bjerknes noted from his study of a dense network of surface observations in and around Scandinavia. A complete article on the development of the cyclone model -still used today by meteorologists worldwide- is available [|here] in a University of Oklahoma article.

Workshop Reference Materials
1. Atmospheric Thermodynamic Diagram (SkewT logP) [|Manual] 2. SkewT logP [|Chart] for March 24, 2009 2. Surface Pressure Weather [|Analysis] for February 28, 2009 3. GOES Water Vapor Satellite [|Image] for March 1, 2009 4. 500 Millibar (Upper AIr) [|Analysis] for March 1, 2009

 Other Useful Links
1. Washington Post [|Video]: Launching a Weather Balloon at Dulles 2. Sky Awareness Week [|Information] 3. NOAA Library Historical Daily Weather Maps [|(1871-2002)]; [|(2003-present)] 4. Is the U.S. climate getting more extreme? [|Dr. Jeff Master's Wunderblog] 5. New York Times Science Page: [|Cyclones] 6. Capitol Weather Gang Blog: In the Shadow of Darwin: [|The Inventor of Forecasting] 7. Does water freeze at 0 Celsius/ 32 Fahrenheit? [|Lee Grenci Blog] 8. If a tornado is nearby, should you get out of your car? [|Capital Weather Gang Blog]