Mary Coen apologizes for her dusty house.

She tells a visitor not to look at the windowsill in her farmhouse living room where a layer of dust has settled from the last burst of wind.

“The Good Lord hasn’t let it rain,” she says.

This summer, it doesn’t take much for the wind to kick up sand in western Kansas.

A 10 to 15 mph wind will cause the horizon to dim; at 30 to 40 mph, it darkens the sky and visibility is less than a 100 feet.

Much of Morton County is in an exceptional drought, the driest rating, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Already it is drier than the driest years of the Dust Bowl.

Since last September — 10 months ago — Morton County near Elkhart has received 2.99 inches of moisture. The normal average rainfall for that corner of Kansas is about 19 inches.

Very Cool!

“The Known Universe” takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang. Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world’s most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History. The new film, created by the Museum, is part of an exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan through May 2010.

The video clips are from July 5th at about 7:00 or 7:30 PM. It should still be quite bright out, but the sky turns brown quite suddenly. From the picture below, it’s easy to see why visibility dropped to a few yards and the streetlights came on two hours before sunset.

These are mostly amateur clips (smart phones, etc.). Some video clips still tend to swing around a bit (hint: position your camera in one place & hold it there. Don’t “pan” around.). I’ve done a bit of sorting through to get the shortest and the best from what I’ve seen.

This is probably the best one. It’s a short time-lapse of the dust storm approaching. Shot by a professional photographer.

Another time-lapse, but from a family standing in front of their house. 6 minutes of video condensed down to 1 minute and 31 seconds.

This one’s from inside a car, then the view changes to outdoors. About a minute into the video, the view is halfway up a mountain road…overlooking the city as the dust storm rolls in. For those of you familiar with the Phoenix area, Camelback Mountain is to the left on the video clip.

Here’s a very quick (35 second) time-lapse of the dust storm moving into Scottsdale, AZ.

And finally, here’s a video clip from a somewhat typical Phoenix-area back yard.

ADDED 10 MINUTES AFTER INITIAL POST: This time-lapse is the best one, by far. Again by a pro photographer.

Of course not. Dumb question. Hopefully, I reeled you in, though.

You’ll probably be seeing lots of fireworks this weekend, but you won’t be experiencing them from this perspective, shot with a tiny spy camera strapped onto the fireworks themselves.

And to add to Jeremy’s previous post about the fireworks forecast, here’s some broader information about fireworks and weather. The info comes directly from the source!

The brilliance of fireworks is better in low humidity,” says Dr. George Zambelli. “The higher humidity will cause the smoke to lay closer to the ground and appear more dense, and ultimately it will decrease the brilliance. The most brilliant fireworks are in low humidity when you have the winds carrying the smoke away from the spectators. In large displays you have a lot of pyrotechnic material going off at once, so you need something to dissipate that smoke.”

A couple of years ago, I did an on-air report analyzing whether climate change was real or a hoax. The scientific community even then was virtually unanimous in stating that with a high degree of probability, Global Climate Change was imminent and was man-made. But there were a few who denied that climate change was real. I set up a list of 60 scientists who had expressed serious doubt about the reality of global climate change…and began to examine the curriculum vitae and employment of each of those scientists. I only made it through about 15 or 20 of the scientists and stopped there; there was no reason to continue. Other than the one dentist and two M.D.s (really!), the remainder of the scientists were geologists or others with active interests in the petroleum industry.

There has since been very strong evidence that climate change-denying scientists have been paid off by oil interests to actively deny climate change. These scientists were paid off by a number of oil interests including Exxon-Mobil, the American Petroleum Institute, and especially, the Koch Brothers. For the report, I also interviewed one of the leading climate change “denialists”, Dr. Patrick Michaels from the Cato Institute. At the time, I was a bit confused as to why an actual climatologist might be denying global warming. But later study revealed that his employer (Cato Institute) was founded and continues to be funded by the Koch Brothers.

Every now and then, a scientific skeptic of climate change will step forward. And that scientist’s motives and credibility come into question once again…because of who’s paying them…lots of whos! And it appears that Exxon-Mobil has broken its promise not to fund climate skeptics.

Of course, normal scientific studies are fully open to peer review; they are not paid to write conclusions which tilt to a foregone conclusion.

*Added July 2nd: Perhaps the words, “paid off” in the 2nd paragraph were too harsh in my original post. However, the funding of climate science denial has quite obviously been in the shadows. And as such, ethical research behooves the researcher to unveil the funding of that research…especially when the funds come from vested interests.

There are two organizations-one public, one private-that are actively preparing for Global Climate Change:

The Pentagon itself stated unequivocally in its February 2010 in its Quadrennial Defence Review Report (pdf), “Climate change and energy are two key issues that will play a significant role in shaping the future security environment.” It noted the department of defence is actively “developing policies and plans to manage the effects of climate change on its operating environment, missions and facilities”.

Insurance companies have a vested interest in reducing the risks of climate change. Like scientists and the military, they’re used to dealing with and planning for uncertainty. As scientists have made clear, climate change is cranking up the dial on extreme weather. Over the last 30 years, catastrophic economic losses have been rising (pdf) with the global temperature, which chops into insurance firms’ profits. With landscapes and livelihoods being sucked into the extreme weather vortex, insurance firm executives – especially in Europe – are getting the message.

The two articles above are from The Guardian.

2010 saw the hottest summer on record for Norfolk, North America, indeed the globe. Russia saw its worst year on record for drought, crop failure, and wildfires. Pakistan saw it worst flooding on record. The litany of extreme weather events goes on and on…and it’s continuing into 2011.

Scientists used to say, cautiously, that extreme weather events were “consistent” with the predictions of climate change. No more. “Now we can make the statement that particular events would not have happened the same way without global warming,” says Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo.

That’s a profound change—the difference between predicting something and actually seeing it happen. The reason is simple: The signal of climate change is emerging from the “noise”—the huge amount of natural variability in weather.

The above is the first of a 3 part series from the magazine, “Scientific American”.

3 links.

NASA’s two Voyager spacecraft have been speeding away from the Earth since 1977. In that 33 years. they have sent back a wealth of information, but perhaps nothing as wild as their recent discovery at the edge of the solar system:

“…the edge of our solar system may not be smooth, but filled with a turbulent sea of magnetic bubbles. While using a new computer model to analyze Voyager data, scientists found the sun’s distant magnetic field is made up of bubbles approximately 100 million miles (160 million kilometers) wide.”

On Wednesday, the Sun ejected a massive amount of particles outward from a solar flare. This event, called a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME), was the largest ever seen by scientists. Most of the material settled back to the Sun. The rest has been ejected into space and will not affect the Earth. Here’s the story from National Geographic.

A remarkable amount and variety of organic material has been found within an ancient meteorite which fell on a frozen Canadian lake in 2000.

The chemical building blocks that make life possible on Earth may have aged to perfection in asteroids, according to a new study.

The research, an analysis of a meteorite that fell on a frozen Canadian lake in 2000, reveals a surprisingly large variation in the organic chemicals found among different chunks of the meteorite. The results suggest the emergence of life on Earth may have depended on a “Goldilocks” situation in asteroids in the few million years after the solar system formed, said study researcher Christopher Herd of the University of Alberta.

“Not too hot, not too cold, just right,” Herd told LiveScience. “And not too much water alteration and not too little. … If you take that material and deliver it to the early Earth, then you deliver what you need for life.”

The U.S. has seen 1,425 tornadoes in 2011 as of June 2. In addition: 5,150 reports of large, damaging hail and 7,068 separate reports of damaging straight-line winds. The red dots are tornado touchdowns, green = hail and blue = high (straight-line) winds.

Here are the locations for those 1,425 tornadoes. It’s remarkable that the vast majority of these dots are east of the Mississippi and relatively far away from the usual Tornado Alley from Texas up through Oklahoma and into Kansas.

The complete report from NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center is available through this link.

Huh? Latin for “Lord Of The Underworld”.

This has absolutely nothing to do with weather. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. New species have been discovered a mile and a half beneath the Earth’s surface in South African gold mines.

“…it places far more complex life in an environment where researchers have generally held it should not, or even cannot, exist.”