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Elise Finch, the beloved and well-known meteorologist at CBS New York, has died. She was 51. Finch died at a local hospital on Sunday, according to the network’s announcement Monday morning. Her cause of death was not announced. “This is a very difficult morning for our CBS 2 family,” morning news anchor Cindy Hsu said on Monday’s broadcast, fighting back tears. […] Prior to joining CBS New York, Finch worked on NBC’s “Early Today Show” and MSNBC. …

Researchers from Aarhus University, in collaboration with Stockholm University and the United States Geological Survey, analyzed samples from the previously inaccessible region north of Greenland...They showed that the sea ice in this region melted away during summer months around 10,000 years ago...During this time period, summer temperatures in the Arctic were higher than today...This was caused by natural climate variability [not] human-induced warming...

This latest experiment was performed near a telecommunications tower on the Säntis mountain in Switzerland that is frequently struck by lightning - roughly 100 times a year, although the tower itself is protected by a lightning rod. The results from the study found the lightning flowed almost in a straight line near the laser pulses, but the lightning strikes were more randomly distributed when the laser was off. While this study is not the first attempt to direct lightning paths it is the first to show it can be done. The scientists have attributed this to the high power laser...

The evidence that hurricane activity is at a historical low is hiding on the Caribbean seafloor, tucked away in odd geological features called blue holes. Blue holes are similar to sinkholes but on a much grander scale. They can be 300 meters deep, like the Dragon Hole in the South China Sea, or 300 meters wide, like the aptly named Great Blue Hole in Belize. The Bahamas is home to the world’s greatest concentration of blue holes, making it an appealing destination for paleotempestologists—scientists who study historical tropical cyclone activity. The seafloor at the base of a blue hole acts...

Germany is expected to see up to 30 cm of fresh snowfall and 90 km/h winds on Tuesday evening as Storm Christian sweeps across the southern and western regions of the country. Reporting the weather on Focus, meteorologist Jan Schenk warned that the combination of forceful winds and heavy snow could lead to dangerous conditions in the south of the country over Tuesday evening and into the night. “Peak winds in the south will reach 90 km/h in the lowlands and hurricane force over the peaks of the Alps,” he said. “This could lead to snow drifts at higher altitudes...

Dogs have been found to be sensitive to Earth's magnetic field, and apparently align themselves along the magnetic north-south axis before they defecate. Czech and German researchers studied 70 dogs during 1,893 defecations and 5,582 urinations over the course of two years, and found that when the Earth's magnetic field was stable the dogs chose to align themselves with it. When it was unstable, such as during a solar flare, the dogs would become confused.

A team of European scientists with way too much time on its hands has discovered that dogs tend to position themselves in alignment with the earth’s magnetic field before they take every big, steamy dump. The Czech and German researchers committed two years of their professional lives to the longitudinal study of canine crap, reports The Christian Science Monitor. The point was to determine magnetic sensitivity in dogs—at least when they poop. The proud scientists say the findings “open new horizons for biomagnetic research.” There were 37 dog owners in Germany and the Czech Republic involved in the study. There...

Then there are all the suggestions that the UFOs are optical illusions, meteorological phenomena or electromagnetic events The Silly Season has come early this year. Normally it happens in August, when wicked people all over the northern hemisphere temporarily stop doing evil things to take their children to the beach and enjoy the last of the summer. With no bad news to report, desperate journalists will run any story, however silly. Why is it Silly Season in June this year? Because the US Department of Defence has announced that it will release a report on 'Unidentified Aerial Phenomena' (UAPs), which...

Seeing our world through the eyes of a migratory bird would be a rather spooky experience. Something about their visual system allows them to 'see' our planet's magnetic field, a clever trick of quantum physics, and biochemistry that helps them navigate vast distances. Now, for the first time ever, scientists from the University of Tokyo have directly observed a key reaction hypothesised to be behind birds', and many other creatures', talents for sensing the direction of the planet's poles. Importantly, this is evidence of quantum physics directly affecting a biochemical reaction in a cell – something we've long hypothesised but...

The new records for “megaflashes”, verified with new satellite lightning imagery technology, more than double the previous values measured in the United States of America and France. The findings were published by the American Geophysical Union’s Geophysical Research Letters ahead of International Lightning Safety Day on 28 June. WMO’s Committee on Weather and Climate Extremes, which maintains official records of global, hemispheric and regional extremes found that: The world’s greatest extent for a single lightning flash is a single flash that covered a horizontal distance of 709 ± 8 km (440.6 ± 5 mi) across parts of southern Brazil on...

A massive lightning strike which hit the Isle of Lewis more than 3,000 years ago may have inspired ancient civilisations to build stone circles, academics believe. Scientists studying a prehistoric stone circle on the Outer Hebrides island discovered evidence of a lightning strike on a nearby site where a circle had been hidden beneath a peat bog. Just one stone remained standing at the site, known as Site XI or Airigh na Beinne Bige, which overlooks the main stone circle, Tursachan Chalanais, at Calanais on the Isle of Lewis. But it is believed that the single stone was once part...

A meteorologist who works at a West Virginia television station was accused of shoving a news anchor on Sunday and fracturing her skull. WSAZ-TV weather forecaster Chelsea Ambriz, 26, of Huntington, was charged with misdemeanor battery after she allegedly shoved station anchor Erica Bivens, the Charleston Gazette-Mail reported. Bivens suffered a ruptured eardrum and skull fracture after she was allegedly shoved down by Ambriz, the newspaper reported, citing a criminal complaint. It doesn’t say what caused the dispute or where it occurred.

We’ve gotten better, but there are still a lot of calculations at play.How much is it going to snow Thursday? As a meteorologist, the bane of my existence is predicting snow. It is the most difficult forecast I make with dozens of different ways it can go wrong. More troubling, it’s probably the forecast most scrutinized before and after the fact. But why? What is it about snow that makes it so tough to pin down? Though temperatures at ground level are important, the critical numbers for assessing snowfall are much higher up in the atmosphere. We’re looking for ice...

Crystal balls at the South Pole. (Photo: Eli Duke/CC BY-SA 2.0)It sounds like the premise for a riddle: At the South Pole are two crystal balls that provides unfailingly accurate information—not about the future, but about the past. This is no trick. It's just meteorology. The dual glass spheres at the South Pole are Campbell-Stokes sunshine recorders, orbs that capture the number of hours of direct sunlight each day, as well as its intensity.Sunshine recorders first came about in the 1850s, thanks to John Francis Campbell—the Campbell in Campbell-Stokes. Around 1853, Campbell, a Scottish author who focused on Celtic folklore, developed a desire to quantify...

George Fischbeck, a science teacher turned weatherman who joined KABC-TV in 1972 and spent nearly two decades exuberantly delivering the local forecast, has died. He was 92. Fischbeck, who was known as "Dr. George," died of natural causes early Wednesday morning at the Motion Picture & Television Fund retirement home in Woodland Hills, his daughter, Nancy Fischbeck, said. A trained meteorologist, George Fischbeck was so enthusiastic about his subject that he sometimes forgot to talk about the next day's weather.

The Maunder Minimum (also known as the prolonged sunspot minimum) is the name used for the period roughly spanning 1645 to 1715 when sunspots became exceedingly rare, as noted by solar observers of the time. Like the Dalton Minimum and Spörer Minimum, the Maunder Minimum coincided with a period of lower-than-average global temperatures. During one 30-year period within the Maunder Minimum, astronomers observed only about 50 sunspots, as opposed to a more typical 40,000-50,000 spots. (Source) Climatologist John Casey, a former space shuttle engineer and NASA consultant, thinks that last year’s winter, described by USA Today as “one of...

The US Air Force confirmed that the 20-year-old Defense Meteorological Satellite Program Flight 13 (DMSP-F13) suffered a "catastrophic event". It shattered into 43 pieces following a sudden temperature spike which triggered the loss of its altitude control. The event happened on 3 February but the incident has only just came to light following questions from website Space News.

We are from the School of Meteorology and we invite you to participate in our research project entitled Tornado Warning Communication and Response. This research is being conducted at The University of Oklahoma. You were selected as a possible participant because you received the link to the online survey. What is the purpose of this research? The purpose of this research is to study how different individuals respond to severe weather communication. What will I be asked to do? If you agree to be in this research, you will answer 10 questions regarding severe weather communication, each with multiple parts....

When you first meet Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at MIT, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, leading climate “skeptic,” and all-around scourge of James Hansen, Bill McKibben, Al Gore, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and sundry other climate “alarmists,” as Lindzen calls them, you may find yourself a bit surprised. If you know Lindzen only from the way his opponents characterize him—variously, a liar, a lunatic, a charlatan, a denier, a shyster, a crazy person, corrupt—you might expect a spittle-flecked, wild-eyed loon. But in person, Lindzen cuts a rather different figure. With his...

HUNTSVILLE, Alabama - The greatest risk of being impacted by a significant tornado in the United States is in a Deep South corridor that includes Huntsville and Birmingham, not the Great Plains region of Oklahoma and Kansas, according to a study co-authored by a University of Alabama in Huntsville researcher. The research paper was written by Tim Coleman, an adjunct professor and researcher in the Earth Systems Science Center at UAH, and Grady Dixon, an associate professor of meteorology and climatology at Mississippi State University. The paper is scheduled to be published by the American Meteorology Society's Weather and Forecasting,...