Opinion

The only predictable thing is change. You can live in the past, or you can embrace the future. My take: With few exceptions, what worked in the 1970s probably won’t work in the 2030s. Technology evolves and improves, and policy imperatives shift over time. The climate crisis demands creativity to power the economy without emitting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Earth is approaching a tipping point — one that requires new and reliable sources of clean energy. A Brief Overview of Energy in the United States In the United States, renewable sources of energy generation are accelerating, accounting for...

Maps Still Don’t Look Like Late October. NOAA’s GFS model roughly 2 weeks out shows a massive ridge of high pressure over the western US and much of western Canada, which suggests another warming trend by the third of fourth week of October. At this rate I wouldn’t be shocked to see a few more 70s within 2 weeks or so. World Meteorological Organization Sharpens Warnings About Both Too Much and Too Little Water. Inside Climate News reports: “The global supply of fresh water is dropping by almost half an inch annually, the World Meteorological Organization warned in a report...

The leaves are leaving, but not before a brilliant, Technicolor explosion of color! Why do leaves even change color? As the days get shorter in the fall, there is less sunlight for photosynthesis. Plants convert carbon dioxide in the air into sugars (glucose and starch) and oxygen by using energy from the sun through the process of photosynthesis. Chlorophyll is the green pigment necessary for photosynthesis. A decrease in photosynthesis that comes with less daylight means trees stop producing chlorophyll. As the green pigment fades over time other pigments present in the leaf are revealed, producing a veritable explosion of...

As Hurricane Henri approached the Northeastern US this past weekend, I wondered how often a tropical cyclone has come within 50 miles of New York City, Boston, or other cities. How many were hurricanes? To answer these questions, we can use the Tropical Cyclones Archive endpoint within the AerisWeather API. This endpoint provides access to the complete AerisWeather historical archive for tropical systems, with data from the late 1800s for the Atlantic basin and the mid-1900s for the Pacific basin. When using the tropical cyclones archive endpoint, we find that 21 tropical cyclones have tracked within 50 miles of New York...

Image credit: NOAA Are you with Team GFS or Team ECMWF, the “European Model”? I hate to pick sides, but as a meteorologist I defer to the weather model that, consistently, is most accurate. Of course I’m rooting for the “American Model”, the GFS or Global Forecast System, to win. But here’s the thing: if you’re sanding a table or building a deck you want to use the best tools at your disposal, right? So it goes with weather forecasting. Meteorologists examine scores of models, looking for consistency, continuity, and trends – ultimately choosing a blend of model solutions that...

Maps Look More Like Early April ”It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade” wrote Charles Dickens in Great Expectations. He had that right. March is weather lunacy, meteorological madness. Few other months can unleash blizzards, tornadoes, 80s and subzero; all packaged into 31 days of utter uncertainty. March 2021 is trending 9.1F warmer than average at MSP with 4 inches of snow so far. There is precious little snow on the ground anywhere, which has lowered the risk...

AerisWeather Maps boasts a versatile range of capabilities. Maps allows users to generate static maps, interactive tiles, and animations. Along with various methods to display you maps, Maps can be utilized as a 3rd party source in most mapping libraries. Let’s take a minute to discuss how easy it is to add an animation to an existing Mapbox GL application. For the tl;dr version, check out our live example. Choose Your Implementation Method We have a couple options you may want to explore. Using the AerisWeather JS SDK, adding an interactive animation is simple by combining the existing map and animate interactive map...

America’s tornado drought is officially over. The last few years have been relatively quiet, with few large, violent tornadoes. In 2018 there were no tornado-related deaths in traditional Tornado Alley, stretching from Texas to Iowa. But so far in 2019, 31 Americans have lost their lives to tornadoes, nature’s most extreme, unpredictable and capricious wind storms. In the last 2 weeks at least 366 tornadoes have been observed east of the Rockies. Once again, the United States is living up to its reputation as the tornado capital of the planet. Over the last couple weeks I’ve watched in morbid fascination...

The most traditional use case for weather data is displaying forecast details or current conditions for an end user. However, there are tons of other fun ways to integrate weather data into applications. Using our weather API, I’ll show you how to capture the greatest temperature delta on a monthly basis in Minnesota throughout 2017. Why am I doing this? Well, I simply wanted to know how large our temperature difference was on a monthly basis. Building the Query The first component of this project will require us to build out a query that searches the entire state on each...

by Paul Douglas Meteorologists track storms of all shapes and sizes, but there is nothing quite as awe-inspiring and destructive as a major landfalling hurricane. These Texas-size whirlwinds of trouble produce a weather-trifecta of risk: storm surge, high winds, and inland flooding. Called typhoons in the western Pacific and cyclones in the Indian Ocean, they are identical in structure and formation; drawing warmth from the oceans and converting it into raging spiral bands of shrieking winds and blinding rain. The lighter the winds aloft and warmer the seas, the greater the potential for a cluster of thunderstorms to strengthen into a...