Dear Weather Club Member,

Welcome to the March edition of our Weather Club e-news!

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Here’s a quick preview of this month’s contents
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Your Test Results Are In . . . It's Starting to Look a Lot Like El Niño . . . We Want Weather Wherever We Web Wander . . . Not a Web Do-It-Yourself Type? Anything Weather Comes to Your Rescue . . . Davis Perception II Onboard Volvo Ocean Race Boats . . . You're Brilliant! Answers to Quiz Questions . . . Who You Gonna Call? Davis! . . . Enjoy!

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Your Test Results Are In
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Okay, we have your February E-News Weather Check Quiz scores all done. (Remember, this will go into your permanent record.) It is as we suspected, you are all a bunch of very smart people.

However, we do have to give three A+'s to super-smarties Ron Scheldrup, a spotter for the National Weather Service on the California coast; Tom Jensen, a Washington pilot; and Nathan Edington, of Maryland. Without telling you (actually, without telling ourselves) we included a sneaky little trick in one of the answers. (You call it a typo, we call it a little trick.) Ron, Tom, and Nathan were quick to point out that if lightning travels at 1/3 the speed of light, it would have to go a lot faster than "60,000 feet per second" as we stated.

Of course what we meant to say was, "The most common kind of strike is actually a return stroke, an intense wave of positive charge traveling upward about 60,000 miles per second (about 1/3 the speed of light)." According to Ron, "1/3 of lightspeed (in a vacuum) is about 62,000 miles per second, while 60k feet (~11.4 miles) per second is only 0.0061% of that velocity. It is still plenty fast - 41,000 mph or about Mach 54 - but nowhere near the speed of light." Tom, who says he enjoys the newsletter so much he hated to even mention it, was so kind as to call the error, "minor, if 5280 to 1 can be called minor." (Sure it can!)

The quiz generated a few other interesting comments. On the subject of snow versus rain temperatures, David Thayer of Oregon shared a "rule of thumb" he developed when he lived in Boulder, CO, and which works only in Boulder: "If the air temperature was below, or dropped below, 38°F, all precipitation would fall as snow; if above 38°, usually as rain. In all the 20-odd years we lived in Boulder, I never once saw this rule fail. By the way, that rule did not work in Las Cruces, NM, nor does it work here in Salem, OR, where I've seen rain as low as 34° and snow as high as 42°. Go figure!"

And Charlie Haggarty of New Hampshire, enjoyed our mapley definition of "sugar snow." He wrote, "I am more familiar with the finer grained hard snow called 'sugar snow' and the larger grained 'corn snow' that are produced when overriding cold air and trapped warm air exchange position. Walking on the resulting snow, 'snish,' or whatever it is called is like walking on ball bearings." (Snish! We love that word!)

Thanks, guys

Weather Check Quiz Question 1: If your name is Sally, Kyle, Vicki, Teddy or Omar (but not Ron, Tom, or Nathan) what very special "club" do you belong to? (See answer at the bottom of this page.)

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It's Starting to Look a Lot Like El Niño
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The federal Climate Prediction Center has warned that we're in for another El Niño event. Since it is still rather early, how severe the warming will be is still unknown.

El Niño seems like a very sweet little name for a globally impacting event, doesn't it? Peruvian fishermen first noticed in that about one December in each decade, the Pacific off their coast got warmer than usual and their fishing was much less successful. They named the event El Niño in honor of the baby Jesus. The more proper name is the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO.

What is El Niño, and why is a little warm water such a big deal? In a non-El Niño year, easterly trade winds drag the Pacific waters toward Indonesia. The sun-warmed water actually piles up in the western Pacific, raising the sea level by half a meter. In an El Niño event, the trade winds weaken and allow the warm water to migrate eastward toward Peru. The first effect, noticed immediately by South American fishermen, is a drop in marine plant and animal life. Globally, however, the effects are even more dramatic. El Niño can lead to a shift of the jet stream, which in turns means changes in storm tracks and monsoons. The cooler western Pacific water creates a milder monsoon season in Indonesia, while the warmer eastern Pacific water brings rain (and swarms of mosquitoes) to the coastal deserts of South America. Droughts in southern African, southern India, Australia, and Mexico result, while Peru, Cuba, and the U.S. Gulf states experience flooding. Hawaii and Tahiti get hit with hurricanes. A shift in the jet stream can mean higher than average temperatures and less rain across the northern tier states from Alaska to the Atlantic coast.

Recent El Niño events such as those in 1983-83 and 1997-98 have been the best observed, caused plenty of damage, and made the term "El Niño" internationally known. But the specific effects of El Niño are not always predictable. The '97-'98 event caused severe flooding in California and along the Gulf Coast and brought killer tornados to Florida. The '82-'83 event brought a series of storms that caused $200 million of damage just in California. But an El Niño back in 1976 coincided with a record drought in California that is still fresh in our memory.

On the other hand, during El Niño events, the folks in the northern United States save a lot of money on heating bills, those on the Atlantic seaboard enjoy the quiet hurricane season, and businesses and industry revel in the lowered costs related to cold weather. According to Jim O'Brien of the Center for Ocean-Atmosphere Prediction Studies in Florida, "El Niño is a good dude for the United States." He says the cold eastern Pacific phenomenon called La Niña is the real problem child. La Niña events sometimes, but not always, follow La Niño events. Maybe this time next year, we'll be talking about the "little girl!" (From Eve to La Niña, females always get the bad rap. Why does it always seem to work that way?)

The Climate Prediction Center website has lots of technical information about El Niño http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov. Their prediction discussion is at http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso_advisory/. More good information can be found at the US Department of Commerce National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations site at http://www.elnino.noaa.gov. There is a very interesting story by Kathleen Wren from Science about researchers using ancient fish bones to analyze El Nino events in Peru thousands of years ago at http://www.usatoday.com/news/healthscience/science/aaas/2002-02-21-nino.htm.

Weather Check Quiz Question 2: The first meteorologist to identify the connection between El Niño and the atmospheric anomalies in the North America was Jacob Bjerknes, son of Vilhelm Bjerknes, one of the founding fathers of the science of meteorology. What other weather idea did Jacob introduce?

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We Want Weather Wherever We Web Wander
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Clyde Royle is a famous model. Well, his picture has been seen by all the truly important people (weather enthusiasts) in a very popular magazine-the 1999 Davis Weather Catalog! In a satisfyingly complete circle, Clyde has linked the photo used in our catalog to his weather web site, which is listed on our Weather World 'Round. (It's at http://5cities.com/scripts/gb_wr.asp, click "Station Info" to see the photo of Clyde). Watching the weather from Grover Beach, CA, where Clyde was born and raised, the weather station is just a 100-yard stroll to the ocean. He told us that there is a grove of eucalyptus trees along the way where the Monarch butterflies stop during their migration. "What a sight," Clyde wrote, "what a feeling. Thousands of butterflies in the air all around you and the soft touch of the air on your face from the fluttering of their wings." (To which we say, sigh.)

We've added a few new Weather World 'Round sites you really ought to check out. There is a Davis station on the roof of WMBD TV, the CBS affiliate in Peoria, IL. Their web address is http://www.wmbd.com/weather.asp. There's a web cam at the Creek's house in North Pole, AK. (It looks very cold…) See it at http://www.wild-alaska.net/weather/. For an interesting presentation of data, look at Friesland, Netherlands at http://www.weerstationgrou.nl/weer/index.asp. And finally, if you are ever curious about the inside temperature in Lorenz's room in Espoo, Finland, click on http://www.hut.fi/Units/Radio/weather/ and you'll know.

Weather Check Quiz Question 3: Humid air is heavier than dry air. True or False? (Answer at the end of this newsletter.)

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Not a Web Do-It-Yourself Type? Anything Weather Comes to Your Rescue
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While you're clicking around the web, check out http://www.anythingweather.com, especially if the idea of getting your weather data on the web seems overly daunting. The folks at Anything Weather will build you a web site with data from your Davis weather station. Using any Davis WeatherLink for Windows software and an internet connection, you can export your data off to them, and voila, your backyard is on the web! They offer links to satellite and radar, and lots of other good stuff. The best part is that they'll do this FREE (unless you are a business).

Anything Weather will sell you a Davis weather station and, for local customers, even come and install it! (They are located in Colorado, California, and Texas.)

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Davis Perception II Onboard Volvo Ocean Race Boats
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A few Davis staffers have been feeling a bit seasick lately, and now we know why. Davis is onboard every boat in the 2001-2002 Volvo Ocean Race! As part of a wireless gateway box, a Davis Perception II and WeatherLink is sailing on the current Rio de Janeiro to Miami leg of the race on all eight boats. This follows a very exciting and dangerous leg across the iceberg-strewn Southern Sea. The gateway box was developed and manufactured by Pilotfish, a company that specializes in wireless solutions for security, control, and other purposes. Along with the Perception II, the box includes a wave indicator and spectrometer. The Perception II measures temperature, barometric pressure, and humidity. Every ten minutes the box sends data by a SatC satellite link to the race headquarters in England. The data is then presented on the official website as well as being used in ongoing research. The race website is at http://www.volvooceanrace.org. From that site you can access the data provided by Pilotfish (direct address is http://www.volvooceanrace.org/result/pilotfish.) You can also check out the Pilotfish website at http://www.pilotfish.se.

We put the full user story about this race on our Davis website. You can read it at http://www.davisnet.com/news/stories/20020317.asp.

Weather Wise Quiz Question 4: Why do icebergs float? (See answer at bottom of page.)

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You're Brilliant! Answers to Quiz Questions
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Question 1: Teddy and Sally, you might get a hurricane named after you in 2002! Those names are on the A-W list approved by the World Meteorological Organization's Hurricane Committee for storms in the Atlantic basin in 2002.

Question 2: In 1919, Jacob Bjerknes, came up with the now very basic ideas of warm, cold and occluded fronts. He also described their relationship to extratropical cyclones. (Source: The USA Today Weather Book by Jack Williams.)

Question 3: False! Humid air is lighter than dry air at the same temperature and pressure because water molecules are lighter than the nitrogen and oxygen they displace. (Source: The USA Today Weather Book by Jack Williams.)

Question 4: The quick answer is that ice is less dense than water and so it floats. But why is that? Almost every other substance is more dense in its solid state than its liquid state. Water, that most wonderful of liquids, is unique in this. Down to 39.2°F, water does become more dense as the temperature drops. But below 39.2°F, hydrogen bonds, in balance with other forces, cause molecules to "line up" a specific distance from each other. They are essentially pushed apart, and become less dense than liquid water. (Source: Alaska Science Forum's very accessible article, "Water as a Solid Citizen," by Carla Hefferich, provided by the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska, Fairbanks. You can find it at http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF13/1362.html.)

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Who You Gonna Call?
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Each month after the E-News goes out, we receive messages back. Sometimes the messages are in response to a story we shared; other times they are a request for help of some kind. We read all the emails, answer those we can, and pass the rest on to the appropriate departments.

We think you should know, though, that if you're interested in the fastest possible reply, news@davisnet.com may not be the best place to send your message. Questions about how things work should be addressed to tech support directly at support@davisnet.com. For general information about the products, such as how much cable comes with a station contact sales@davisnet.com. To request a catalog, you'll find links for catalog here on our web site at http://www..davisnet.com/contact/catalog.asp.

Please continue to send your comments, weather URLs, and story suggestions to news@davisnet.com. We look forward to getting your comments and any responses you have to the E-newsletter. Member participation is what keeps the E-newsletter alive and kicking.

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Well, that’s it for this month. Will be checking in again in April.
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