80: Weather, Whether You Like it or Not

Speaker 0 00:03 Welcome to brain junk. I'm trace <inaudible> and I'm 80 Barton and today we're going to talk about everything. You never knew you wanted to know about weather. Ooh, I'm very excited. Especially since we're headed into fall. Although whenever this airs it might be winter. That's okay. We're going to be out with all kinds of crazy snow storm because of our episodes. Maybe the thing that got me interested in, Speaker 1 00:27 the thing that actually got me interested in talking about the weather was have you ever been looking out your window and you're like, it's definitely a hundred percent rainy out there, but the chance of precipitation is like 50% according to the weatherman or like they say it's 100% chance of rain and you're like not here. It's not raining currently. Ah, yes. Okay. There does seem to be a lot of contradiction in all those numbers. Yes. Okay. That's because I don't think they mean what we think they mean to me it means is it going to rain or is it not? But it is actually a two part equation. So the probability of precipitation is what they're telling us. But what that is composed of is C times a where see the confidence that precipitation will occur, blah, blah. What it really is C is confidence. The weatherman thinks it's definitely gonna precipitate in our forecast area, which for us is all of Spokane County for a lot of the newscasters. Speaker 1 01:22 And that's a big area. Oh yeah. But the, it's also a multiplied by a and that is the percent of the area that will receive measurable precipitation. Because what? Spokane County, 20 miles this way, 20 miles that way it's a huge area. So when it says 10% chance of rain, that means that 10% of, what does that mean? It's like 50% confident that rain will occur in 80% of the coverage area comes out to be 40% chance of precipitation. When you do that math, you multiply 0.5 times 0.8 and you get 40% Oh cause see I always thought it just meant that during the 24 hour period that we've given you this for, there's an 80% chance of rain. Yeah. They're just saying we're pretty sure. And I'm just like, yeah, it's probably going to rain at some point. Yes. But that numbers half the equation, he does that. Speaker 1 02:10 He or she, the weather person, the meteorologists. Oh, there we go. Yes. The meteorologist determines the likelihood that precipitation will actually occur and then they look at their coverage area and determine how much of that area they think the rain will fall in. Huh. Or snow or hail or crickets. What haves? Yeah. I think the thing that, because weather is, so, I listened to this whole, uh, I think it was a podcast or something where they were talking about weather and how difficult even with, Oh, I know it's with the, all the stuff that happened with the hurricane that just came through and how difficult it is to predict where and when and how and all that sort of stuff. Even with all our computer models and everything like that. I mean, yeah, there's, it feels like, to me there is still some element of like, Oh, I'm just going to roll the dice and whatever that number is, it comes up the weather. Speaker 1 02:59 We all start talking like dr Malcolm from Jurassic park. Chaos theory with the water drop on his head. Yeah. Is it going to go down my hand? Is it going to go to my wrist? Who knows? I don't know. Take your umbrella. Andrew coat. That's right. Huh? <inaudible> so now all of this different kind of probability of precipitation. I want to talk about a specific kind of precipitation that you mentioned because one of the things that you were really talking about was anomalies of weather. Yeah. And I want to hear about the orange snow and <inaudible>. Yes. That one. There's a picture of the thing I came across. There's a picture of a lady on a snowboard in the desert. It was what it looks like. And I thought, cause I looked at some of these pictures and it, it looked to me like people were skiing on poured out macaroni and cheese powder. Speaker 1 03:44 Yeah. Yeah. It's about that color. It's weird. Or orangy red. And apparently that happens about every five years in Europe. The, what happens there is there are storm fronts big enough that Africans storms are blowing their sand into Siberia. Rude. Yeah. So you've got gritty, the people that live in that path must just have grit for ages and it just blows onto, there's enough of it once in a blue moon once every five years that it blows right onto the snow too. And so it looks orange and so then you put your foot on it and it's white underneath. But it's a weird looking look it up. I also have another anomaly and I'm calling it fire NATO. I love it so much. Now the official name is a fire whirl or a fire twister. But that isn't cool. It's not cool enough for me. Speaker 1 04:32 Nope. No, it's definitely gotta be fire NATO from here on out. That's what we will be calling it. And actually if you Google fire NATO, you're going to find all the same information that I'm telling you right now. So it's the, yeah, everyone agrees it's the better name. So what's cool about the fire NATO is, you know, we've seen a water spouts or tornadoes, you know, it's that spinning, rotating clouds are water kind of thing. Well, when you have a big wild fire, if it's growing quickly enough, it's creating a lot of hot air all at once. And that's super heated. Air makes updrafts and downdrafts so it's got air going in two different directions. Right. Okay. Like if you had your pencil in your hand it between your palms and then you're moving your pause back and forth, you can spend your pencil around. Speaker 1 05:16 Well that's what that hot air is doing. And as that twisting air happens, if the fire is really raging, it will pull the fire up into the air twirling along and it makes a fire tornado. That sounds terrifying. It's terrifying. The gorgeous, there's a video in Australia and these guys were way too close to be filming cause I was watching and I realized I'm looking at trees and this fire tornado is easily 60 feet tall. Oh my gosh. And they're super casual about it. Uh, clearly they haven't watched twister. Yeah. And usually they're not that big and they'll come and go because the weather is, you know, the, the hot air is making the air move all over the place. Uh, there was one in the car fire. I was that really big one. Yeah. I was cute two years ago. No where paradise burned and all this kind of stuff. Speaker 1 06:08 Yeah. Uh, that was the size of three football fields. Oh my goodness. And the photograph of that is terrifying cause you can't really see the fire NATO because there's so much black smoke. But you can definitely tell the whole thing is twisting. Yes. And what makes them particularly dangerous is that you think about, you've got all this burning material. Yeah. And then it's throwing it everywhere. It's a moving then sparks and little fluffies or Oh gosh, super dangerous. Does it take on its own? Does it need those currents or is it like a regular Tonio that then becomes its own, it creates its own currents. Yeah. Wow. It's terrifying. Wow. I have another anomaly that's slightly less dangerous, but, all right, totally cool. So noctilucent clouds knocked to loosen clouds. Okay. Night bright. Oh, clouds. There we go. They are the Earth's highest clouds, way up in the atmosphere, way up, way up in the Mesosphere that's 50 miles above the surface of the earth. Speaker 1 07:10 If you think about it, airplanes are flying at about seven miles above. Oh, that's way, way, way, way up. It's right at the, the the edge of space. Okay. And there are tiny ice crystals that form around media, right? Dust and there's very thin, very thin little sheets and they're all floating around up there. Well, if the light is just right at sunrise or sunsets, you've got the light coming through at a slanty angle. You can see electric blue clouds. Excellent. Super high. Used to be, you could only see them over the Arctic because that was where it was cold enough that they formed because of climate change. The Mesosphere is somehow getting wetter and colder in places. So some people have seen them like in Kansas or Colorado, but I'm really very rare. It's like the Aurora where we don't see it very often. It's mostly up there, Alaska and up higher. We had the opportunity to see in a predefined North, I know we did have an opportunity like last week I sent and jazz and I went outside and we stood and waited and waited and waited and waited and we saw a satellite go overhead and then we went home. Aw. It was very disappointing. Speaker 1 08:23 But that's weather, right? I mean you never know. It could be there, it could not be there. All right, so let's see. Hmm. I'm looking at the list of things that we wanted to talk about. I want to know about high atmosphere effect on coffee since we just talked about, yeah, we're high clouds. Let's talk about fancy coffee. Now we're bringing it back to earth. Yup. I've seen a few things online saying that barometric pressure can affect where the bubbles in your coffee are. So sometimes coffee has a little bit of a bubbly, foamy kind of thing. Yeah. Not full on latte foam cause that makes its own with its own whole service engine. But like few bubbles on black coffee, they, you'll see pictures of the bubbles on the outside ring of the mug or in a little collection in the center. And scientists hypothesize that it is bare metric pressure. Speaker 1 09:10 The bare metric pressure is a measure of air pressure. So low bare metric pressure happens when it's cold and high when it's hot. So what's happening with those coffee bubbles is coffee has its own surface tension and it's got its own. A warm beverage has its own heat underneath. So here's a question while you're looking at your notes then this would probably be true for any liquid sinking bubbles on it. To some extent that was warm, right? I don't know how much viscosity would affect it. We have to drive up to the, up to paradise on Mount Rainier as high as we can go and be like, are there bubbles? Are there not bubbles? Cause that won't getting weird looks in the parking lot. I look like Mickey mouse. What does that mean? That actually does out to meeting. So liquids have surface tension and tend to adhere to objects. Speaker 1 09:57 So when coffee is hot, it creates a small amount of pressure of its own on the underside of the surface. It's pushing up just a little, it's mounding, which makes sense because those molecules are moving and things are, so it's got its own pressure. If Behr metric pressure is low, it's cold. Those bubbles can do their own thing. That calm vex mound shape will allow the bubbles to float to the outside because the heat of the coffee is overcoming, is pushing up against the pressure from the air. Yeah. So cold day, hot coffee, you should have a ring of bubbles around the outside. Oh, hi bear. My PR barometric pressure will overcome that surface tension, tension, and it'll push the bubbles. Um, it'll push that con cavity. It'll create a concavity and a little dip or not even necessarily a dip. It will, the bubbles will congregate. They won't be forced out from the center. So the hangout together. So if you've got bubbles kind of all over the place, you could have changing weather or a neutral barometric pressure based on liquid temperature. Wow. Words I just used. That's fantastic. I'm gonna have to talk about the waffle house now for a few minutes. We'll talk about the menu first. Speaker 1 11:09 All right, well take me to waffle house. When I lived in Atlanta, we went to waffle house. So yeah, there'll be a little little memory lane trip because you know it's waffle house. It is actually quite interesting. Um, after extreme weather, like floods and hurricanes and things, waffle houses are quick to reopen even if they can only serve a limited menu. So they will open as soon as possible with whatever they have on hand or whatever they can get shipped in and start serving as soon as it's safe for employees to get there. And they have stuff to cook right away. So the index was invented by Craig, phew gate, who was a director of FEMA, the federal emergency management agency. So this goes back to 2004. He, if a waffle house is closed because there's a disaster, it's bad. We call it red if they're open, but have a limited menu that's yellow. Speaker 1 12:01 So this index is directly related. They have their own language around the waffle house index. It's a real thing with FEMA now in 2011 FEMA explained, it's not just charming and endearing. It's actually scientifically useful because it, the sooner the restaurants and the stores and banks can reopen, the sooner economies start recovering. So the waffle house is the first indicator that recovery has occurred or the first indicator that things have gotten really, really bad. Well, I mean that makes sense because if you've got something where people have to be able to get to work, like if you had really bad flooding and the waffle house managed to get open, well that means that 15 people or 10 people could get out of their homes and get to that building. Yup. It's an underwater right. Or you know, and so I think that actually makes sense that that would be a good indicator. Speaker 1 12:50 That's an astute scientist who noticed that. Yeah. Who looked around and he was like, nobody's open except waffle house and maybe the Walgreens and now I kind of wonder, is there like waffle house street credit? Are they like, there's a power line zinging around out front. But if we go around the back, we can climb through the window. How much, how far will they go to reopen? I'm sure corporate says you have to stay safe and they probably do, but that's true. But you've got to admire companies that, uh, in an emergency want to help people. I mean, you are sure more and more about that lately with, with more climate issues where there are companies that are like, Hey, we're just in and this food is going to spoil. There's a need. We need to meet them. So we're going to try to cook it and feed people. Yup. Wow. That's like Mr. Rogers says, look for the helpers. They work at the waffle house. Speaker 1 13:45 I do feel like we should've researched the probability of aquatic life being pulled into a tornado. I feel like that was a missed opportunity. It is kind of a missed opportunity. Hold on time. Oh no. Doing some research. Oh, there's no next time. Okay. So to wrap up our weather, Amy and I just got into a huge discussion about the probability of sea life being sucked into a tornado because you know, fire NATO shirt, NATO, there's a lot of NATO going on. Apparently water spouts can turn up S at speeds of up to 200 miles an hour. Oh. And the things that they are sucking up, like sailboats or fish of different sizes can fly through the air. It's like the fish are swimming in the cloud. Wow. It really can happen and depending on how far they travel and how high they are taken in the atmosphere, fish or sometimes dead by the time they rain down and people as far as a hundred miles inland have experienced raining fish. They can also get sucked up from rivers so born because that's clearly a devastating weather event. But that is so cool. Although it says here on science line.org that raining fish is not a common weather. Fewer than 10 occurrences have been reported in the past year. I think what's really funny about those is imagine 200 years ago yes. And your 50 miles from any water, the water, and then fish. Yeah. You could totally see why people would think the crickets are next. It's safe. The rivers will run with blood. Yes, exactly. Speaker 1 15:17 Email [email protected] we're also on Facebook and Instagram as brain junk podcast, or you can find us on Twitter as at my brain, Jack, Amy, and I will catch you next time when we share more of everything you never knew you wanted to know and I guarantee you will not be bored.