Saturday, my wife and I took a few kids we go to church with up to Mount Rose and Lake Tahoe while their mom had a work meeting in Reno. After spending some time playing in the snow where Highway 431 crosses the mountain (elevation 8,911), we drove down to Kings Beach for some hot […]
How Hurricanes Get their Names
This hurricane season has proven to be an intense one, with several major hurricanes causing destruction across the Southeast and the Caribbean. The remnants of one hurricane, Ophelia, even caused damage in several western European countries. With names like Ophelia and Philippe, one might wonder how hurricanes get their names to begin with. The short […]
No, we don’t need to add a ‘Category 6’ to the hurricane scale
Hurricanes are categorized according to the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale, which organizes tropical cyclones with winds greater than 74 mph into categories from 1 to 5. Each category comes with a description of what damage can be expected in an area that the center of the storm passes over. Occasionally, I see talk of a […]
Watching Weather Balloons on Ham Radio
UC Berkeley’s Amateur Radio Club (archive) and the East Bay Amateur Radio Club (archive) in California launched a balloon with a tracking device Saturday, which allowed radio amateurs to see how far the balloon went, how high it went and how fast it was going. After launching the balloon on the UC Berkeley campus, the […]