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Trivia ~ Weather
10 minutes, a hurricane releases more energy than all the world's nuclear weapons combined.
It takes ten inches of snow to equal one inch of rain. So if you got a foot of snow, you would have only gotten 1.2 inches if it had been rain instead
The speed of an average falling rain drop is 7 miles per hour
Liquid precipitation must be over 0 .02 inch in diameter to be considered a raindrop. Anything smaller is considered drizzle. And who's the luck guy who gets to measure this stuff??
As we move toward cold weather, (Aren't you glad I reminded you?) I thought it might be interesting to take a look at those cold crisp days. Why do really cold days feature sunlight that is brighter and clearer than on warmer days?
Because, the colder the air, the less humidity it can hold. This is
because at low temperatures, water molecules in the air are much more
likely to land on a surface and stick and less likely to evaporate back into the air. With less water in the air, there are fewer particles to scatter the sunlight.
How fast does Earth's water cycle run?
The Sun's energy evaporates water from the ocean, then falls as rain on land, and then runs into rivers and back to the oceans. This cycle has been going on for billions of years.
Every day, about 30 trillion gallons of water falls on land (136
trillion liters). At that rate, a volume of water the same size as all the world's oceans passes through the atmosphere every three thousand years.However, not all water recycles that quickly. Some of the deepest currents can move near the ocean bottom for thousands of years before returning to the surface, and water can be stored in ice caps or underground for millennia.
The oceans hold the greatest volume of water on the planet. Only a tiny fraction of Earth's water is fresh, and most of that is locked up in polar ice.
How can clouds hold so much water that they just keep raining--for days on end, even?
Well, storm clouds keep replenishing themselves as they roll along. Inside a thunderhead, moist air is rising rapidly. As it does, it cools. Cool air can't hold as much water vapor, so the water condenses and rain falls.
The rain usually falls behind the storm. As the storm rolls across the land, air rises on the front edge, and rain falls at the back. This is why the clouds usually roll in before the rain does.
The average number of people killed by tornadoes in the United States each year is 159. The state of Texas has had the most number of people killed since 1953?
STATES WITH THE HIGHEST TORNADO DEATHS
1. Texas .... 371
2. Mississippi . 316
3. Michigan . 231
4. Indiana .. 205
5. Alabama .. 202
The world's greatest temperature extreme--the range between record high and low temperature-is found in Verkhoyansk, Siberia: 36.7 degrees C (98 degrees F) to minus 76.8 degrees C (minus 90 degrees F). That is a 113.5 C degree (188 degree F) difference.
How much does an inch of rain equate to inches of snow?
It is popularly believed that a 10-to-1 ratio prevails between snowfall and water content. But the water content of snow is more variable than this, making the 10-to-1 ratio inaccurate. It depends on temperature and wind speed.
One inch of water yields about 10 inches of snow in light winds when temperatures are 28 to 34 degrees. One inch of water yields about 15 inches of snow at 20 to 27 degrees, and when temperatures are in the teens, 20 to 30 inches.
Why are the four seasons unequal in length?
Kids learn early about the world's injustice. Winter, with its long days in school, drags on, while summer flies by in a flash. Blink between July 4th and Labor Day and you miss it.
Surprise! In the Northern Hemisphere, summer lasts 93.65 days, while winter actually blows over in a mere 88.99. Spring lasts 92.76 days and autumn, 89.84. But why? Because no matter how things might seem to be going in your life, you are never really going around in circles, at least not with regard to the sun. The earth you're standing on takes an elliptical, not a circular path around it. We're closest to the sun in January, when its gravitational pull on the Earth is strongest, briefly speeding us up in our orbit, and slightly abbreviating autumn and winter.
A hailstone weighing more than one-and-a-half pounds once fell on Coffeyville, Kansas. No one was hit.
Where in the world does it rain the most?
Anywhere I plan to have a picnic. Ok, OK! Rather than precipitate a crisis with my readers, I'll give you the conventional answer.
It's on the island of Kauai in sunny (?) Hawaii. There, on the slippery slopes of Mt. Waialeale, you never have to get a forecast to know if you should take an umbrella. You should cart one all the time because Waialeale gets an average 472 inches of rain a year.
While we're into liquid data, note that the most rainfall in a 24-hour period anywhere was the 46 inches that fell on Bauio in the Philippines in 1911. The most in any place in a given year was the 905 inches that went drippy-poo on Chirapunji, India in 1861.
In other words, if it's hard to spell or pronounce, plan to stay indoors.
In Fairfield, Montana on Christmas Eve, 1924. At noon it was 63 degrees Fahrenheit, a balmy afternoon to get in that last minute shopping. Well, I hope any shopper who was going to be out that evening spreading good cheer picked up a pair of yak fur-lined mittens for themselves because by midnight the mercury had plummeted to 21 degrees below zero. That's a drop of 84 degrees in 12 hours!
According to NASA, the U.S. has the world's most violent weather. In a typical year, the U.S. can expect some 10,000 violent thunderstorms, 5,000 floods, 1,000 tornadoes, and several hurricanes.
Of the total number of people hit by lightning, 83% of them are men
Want a simple way to check the weather each day? Stare into your coffee cup (before you pour the milk). If you see bubbles floating toward the rim of the cup, it means that the pressure is low and you should look for clouds and stormy weather. If the bubbles float toward the center of the cup, it means that the pressure is high and you can expect fair weather. Keep in mind that bubbles will always float to the lowest point on the surface of coffee. So, with high pressure, the center of the coffee is pushed down and the surface of the drink is low in the center and high on the sides. When pressure is low, the center rises relative to the edge of the coffee.
So there you go, impress the kids.
The biggest snowflake ever reported measured 15 inches across.
The fastest wind speed ever recorded is 318 mph in one of the May 3, 1999 Oklahoma tornadoes
A hailstone weighing more than one-and-a-half pounds once fell on Coffeyville, Kansas. No one was hit.
You can't really fry an egg on the sidewalk during a heat wave. Unfortunately (or fortunately), even asphalt doesn’t get much hotter than 145 degrees F. during the worst scorcher, 13 degrees short of the mark.
But the hood of a car can hit 178 F. in the sun, which will do the trick.
Oh! I’m sorry, was that your BMW?
If there would be no greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the average temperature on Earth would be 5 degrees Fahrenheit, instead of the present average of 57 degrees Fahrenheit
Tornadoes seem to be an almost-exclusive North American phenomena; they occur more often in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world.
As bits of trivia are presented on my e-mail list I will add them here. See them first by sending an e-mail to twotreestrivia-subscribe@topica.com
If you have other good Trivia to add please E-mail me
