Largest Hail Stones

This is thought to be one of the largest hail stones ever recorded. It fell in the backyard of Maria Natividad Garay, who lives in the foothills of Villa Carlos Paz, Argentina, on the 8th of February 2018. It is roughly the size of a grapefruit and fell in a fifteen-minute downpour that smashed her skylights and left her home filled with ice that piled up like snowdrifts on her floor. She still keeps today in a zip-locked bag in her freezer.

Source: Mitch Dobrowner for The New York Times

Weather Forecasting Infrastructure

Across the world, at all times of the day and night, weather forecasting infrastructure is detecting and warning the public of at least 2,000 storms. It is thanks to this infrastructure that storm-warned districts have time to implement damage prevention measures such as road closures and flood warnings. The World Meteorological Organization suggests that these warnings save the global economy upwards of $100 billion each year. 

Source: World Meteorological Organization https://public.wmo.int/en/about-us/FAQs/faqs-weather

Olaf Schuiling

82-year-old retired geochemist from the Netherlands - Olaf Schuiling, proposes that olivine offers a solution to global warming. The green-tinted rock is mineral that is believed to be a major constituent of Earth’s upper mantle and, when exposed to open air, removes carbon dioxide from our atmosphere. Schuiling suggests the rock is used for footpaths, roads and even as the base of children’s playgrounds, as has been implemented in the Netherlands. Using enough olivine, he says, can remove enough CO2  to significantly slow rising temperatures across the world.

Image: A playground surface made of olivine in Arnhem, the Netherlands. Source: Jasper Juinen for The New York Times

Algernon Henry Belfield

The personal weather recordings of Algernon Henry Belfield, a farmer from Eversleigh, 20kms from Armidale, are now being used in America for international climate modelling. Belfield recorded meticulous weather notes daily from 1877 to 1922 and these recordings are particularly valuable considering that official rainfall recordings didn’t begin until 1900 and temperature recordings didn’t begin until 1910. Of especial interest is Belfield’s recording of the Federation Drought of 1987-1903.

Source: ABC News

Balga tree in flower

Meteorology has been practiced in Australia long before any European records began. Indigenous peoples of Nyoongar country in south west Western Australia recognised that the Balga’s flowers emerge to indicate the changing from the Djilba (growing) season to the Kambarang (end of the rains) season. Scientists suggest that the drop in humidity that is associated with the oncoming dry season triggers this flowering. This is just one of many examples of Indigenous knowledge pre-dating science.

Image: Balga tree in flower. Source: gladysclancy

Land surface temperatures of the Arctic

Scientist’s warnings of polar bear extinction came on the same day that the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk, north of the Arctic Circle, experienced a heat wave that peaked at 38 degrees Celsius – the highest ever recorded temperature in the Arctic. Danish meteorologist Martin Stendel noted that this temperature “would be a 1 in 100,000 year event for a normal distribution of anomalies without climate change.”

Image: Land surface temperatures of the Arctic on the 20th of June 2020 compared to the 2003 -2018 average spring temperatures. Source: Handout/NASA Earth Observatory

Polar Bears

On Monday the 20th of June 2020 scientists have warned that polar bears could face extinction by the end of the century. The summer Arctic ice extent has declined by around 13% per decade when compared to its 1981-2010 average, leaving the bears with a longer summer-fasting period and a shorter winter-feeding period, resulting in mass starvation.

Source: Josh Anon https://500px.com/joshanon

source: @martinstendel (Twitter) https://twitter.com/MartinStendel/status/1280237922067890178/photo/1

Red Dawn

 The dust from the “Red Dawn” that enveloped Sydney in 2009 went on to fertilise the ocean in a natural form of geoengineering. Because Australian dirt is particularly high in iron, it encouraged the mass growth of phytoplankton – microscopic plants that turn the sea green and, when grown in large numbers, cleanse the atmosphere by removing carbon dioxide.

Image: satellite data showing mass growth of phytoplankton (red) in the Tasman Sea. Source: Marine and Freshwater Research

Sydney's largest recorded dust storm

On the 22nd of September 2009 Sydneysiders woke to the largest dust storm the city had ever recorded, coined the “Red Dawn”, with dust coating the harbour bridge originating from the southern Lake Eyre Basin, South Australia and western and central New South Wales. The 3,000km long dust plume carried approximately 2.5 million tonnes of sediment off Australia and onto the Tasman Sea – the biggest loss of topsoil recorded in Australian history.

Image: Satellite imagery of the dust storm going over the Tasman Sea. Source: Marine and Freshwater Research.

Frog in a jar

Before weather forecasts, farmers in the Britain looked to a frog in a jar of water with a small branch for their weather predictions. If the frog stayed in the water, conditions were expected to be bad, but, as it sensed a warm and sunny change, farmers could expect to see the frog edging its way up the branch. Despite the fact that the Brits happily accepted the movement of a frog as reliable prediction, when an MP suggested to the House of Commons that, with new developments of science, one could soon know the weather twenty-four hours in advance, he was laughed out of the room.

Source: Alamy

The First Daily Weather Forecast

The first ever weather forecasts began in 1860 when Admiral Robert FitzRoy, who was once Darwin’s captain on the HMS Beagle, was concerned by the deaths at sea caused by unforeseen storms. He began by using the electric telegraph to pre-warn coastal outposts and later published his analysis of the atmosphere in The Times across Britain in 1861.

Image: first daily weather forecast. Source: The Times 08/01/1861