KOMO Weather Blog

Train vs. tornado..Who wins?

Meteorologist Jon Aaron of our sister station KBCI-TV in Boise is also writing a weather blog and I'll be featuring some of his content here from time to time. -Scott

Have you even wondered what would happen if a freight train ran through a strong thunderstorm with strong winds or even a tornado? Well, it happened on Jan. 8, 2008 in northern Illinois.

Mother Nature to cloud: "Show off!"

It's getting hot -- are you prepared for wildfires?

The volcano that just keeps on giving...

High tech, schmi-tech -- we're still using balloons!

Computers, GPS, Doppler Radar, the Internet, and high-resolution satellites have sure changed the way we forecast the weather since the 1930s, but you might be surprised to know there's still one weather measurement that is decidedly low-tech -- a hydrogen balloon.

Yes, some 70 years later, we still rely on a simple weather balloon to get some important data. In fact, all those fancy expensive computer forecast models would be lost without them.

In the Northwest, weather balloons are launched twice a day at 4 a.m. PST and 4 p.m. PST from near Forks, WA, Spokane, Salem, Medford and Boise (which is on Mountain Time, so it's 5 a.m./p.m. MST for them.)

The balloons have a small weather instrument panel attached 6 feet below and rise at about a rate of about 1,000 feet a minute, according to noaa.gov. Here are some other interesting facts from their web site:

The sensors measure temperature, relative humidity and atmospheric pressure. (And wind speed and direction, but that's come around thanks to some newer technology -- GPS. By knowing the balloons location versus time, it can compute the wind speed and direction at a given altitude.)

The data is then sent every two seconds via small 1950s-era radio transmitter back to the ground, which uses a 1980s era IBM PC/XT processing computer. However, the weather measuring devices these days are quite high-tech, says Bill Blackmore with the National Weather Service.

More interesting tidbits from NOAA:

Big Apple needs a big umbrella

New York City has turned into "Seattle east" this spring, with a relentless rainy pattern parked over the Northeast and turning what should be their warming spring-into-summer pattern more reminiscent of a Seattle autumn.

So far in June, it has rained on 22 of the 28 days in New York. To put that into perspective, Seattle has gone at least a full year without having 22 wet days in a month -- yes, even including November, December and January.

This comes on the heels of a May that saw 13 days of rain, including a 7-day rain streak. Not to be outdone, June brought an 8-day streak, good for fourth longest ever there.

We have to go back to mid March to look how long it took us to accumulate 35 days of rain.

Other Random Notes:

Now that is some major league hail

A cloud formation that will blow your socks off

Our sunsets are prettier than yours

OK, so Seattle doesn't have much of a reputation of getting to see the sun too often. But when the clouds part in the evening, it is hard to top a Pacific Northwest sunset.

Case in point is this spectacular sunset shot from Clane Gessel, who snapped this photo out in the Olympic National park recently.

Clane was gracious enough to make a larger version available for those who want to use it as a computer desktop (as I have done here at my computer). You can download it at this link.

And here's another one, taken from a reader in Mukilteo from Sunday night:

While not a sunset -- this photo shows a nice hole in the sky, created by sinking air that dries up surrounding moisture. It's by YouNews contributor "Sarahsphotos."

While we're on the subject of pretty pictures, here are some time lapse videos to make up for last week when the end of the dry streak took the time lapse's usual Friday slot:

Weather forecasters: Over 300 billion served