GFS Extended Snowfall Outlook (WeatherBell/The Minnesota Star Tribune)
(NOAA/The Minnesota Star Tribune)
"The wispy cloud trails left by aircraft cause more warming than the carbon emissions from their fuel. Now there might be a simple way to stop them forming. THERE are few more delightful antidotes to stress than to lie on your back in warm grass and watch the clouds go by. As children, we love finding the outlines of animals and castles in the billowing shapes. As adults, there is something calming and comforting about those fluffy tufts of white drifting slowly past. Clouds are beautiful. Clouds are innocent. With one exception. The streaky smears of cloud that criss-cross the sky in the wake of aeroplanes may look too wispy to cause any harm. But we now know that these condensation trails, or contrails, make an outsized contribution to global warming by trapping heat like a downy jacket. "They are one of the few manifestations of man-made climate change agents that you can actually observe," says David Lee, an atmospheric scientist at Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK. As the evidence mounts to show how harmful contrails are, some engineers are reaching for an audacious solution: scrub them from the sky altogether. Contrails are created when water condenses to form ice crystals around tiny particles of soot from aircraft exhausts. Yet there is no fundamental reason why this has to happen. Decades of experiments with spy planes, alternative engines and, most recently, with artificial intelligence have shown that it is possible to stop them forming. It won't be easy: wiping the atmosphere clean of contrails may require nothing less than a wholesale reimagining of the traffic in our skies."
"The bushfires that ravaged Australia between 2019 and 2020 were so huge that they spewed as much smoke into the stratosphere as a large volcanic eruption, with serious consequences for the environment, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science. The stratosphere is the second layer of the atmosphere, right above the troposphere – where we live. "For us, it was a huge surprise" to see such a significant effect, study co-author Ilan Koren, a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, told AFP. "I never saw such an injection (of smoke) to the stratosphere," he said. The amount of smoke released into the atmosphere by the fires is comparable to that put out by the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, which was the second-largest of the 20th century. Researchers noted that the smoke drifted away from Australia to the east, and then returned again from the west two weeks later. "We could see the smoke completing a whole circulation in two weeks," Koren said. "I never saw such a strong event spread so fast." The phenomenon can be explained by three factors, according to the study. First, the fires themselves were intense."
"In 1958, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake triggered a debris avalanche into Southeast Alaska's Lituya Bay. Displacing estimated 40 million cubic yards of water in an instant, the avalanche created a wave that ran 1,700 feet up a mountainside before racing out to sea. The largest known tsunami in history was taller than the Empire State Building in New York - 1,454 feet (or 443,2 meters) tall. Geological evidence, historical testimonies, and even myths suggest that earthquakes followed by megatsunami are quite common here. Since 1853, at least four or five similar events are documented. French explorer Jean-François de La Pérouse, who explored Alaska in 1786, noted that the shores of Lituya Bay "had been cut cleanly like with a razor blade," suggesting that a tsunami occurred shortly before his arrival. Local legends of seamonsters shaking the Earth record even earlier events, predating modern explorers and scientists by centuries. Researchers now think the region's widespread loss of glacier ice helped set the stage for the earthquakes and their increasing intensity."
