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From November 5th through the 12th the Earth will be entering a stream of debris from a comet known as 2P/Encke. This will bring us the annual Taurid Meteor Shower. Each night (especially around the midnight hour) about 5 Taurids per hour will shoot from the constellation Taurus straight overhead. While this is not as many as an average meteor shower, the Taurid meteors are remarkable in other ways! Many stargazers have observed the Taurids to be very bright and slowing fireballs in the sky. Below are a few stories submitted to NASA after the 2005 Taurid Meteor Shower, which happened to bring many -- a big show.
-On Oct 28, Lance Taylor of
-On Oct. 30, Bill Plaskon of
-On Nov. 2 in the
This year keep your eyes peeled toward the night sky, as you may happen to sight one of these spectacular occurrences!
Its funny how a few years away changes your outlook. When I first got this job in September, the very first thing I thought of was the beauty of the fall colors. The timing was perfect, I would get to see them this year. For the past ten years, I have lived in the deep
south, with very few deciduous trees or in the Southern Plains, with almost no trees. Every year, it seemed as if the seasons went from green in the summer to an ugly winter gray and brown, without those few weeks of fall splendor. The changing colors are kind of like nature's encore, the grand finale to the growing season.
On a day off recently, I took a drive around Amherst County on the foothills of the mountains to see the show. It was early in the season, but some reds, yellows and browns were beginning to dot the trees on the mountain. I took a lot of pictures, this one was the best one.
This weekend is typically the "peak" weekend for fall colors in Central and Southwestern Virginia. Because of that, I have invited
my girlfriend from Texas to visit. We have already planned on taking a drive on the parkway to take see the fantastic display. I know she will enjoy it as much as I will.
I am sure there are many of you in the area who are just like I was, and take this annual show for granted. Sometimes you have to have something taken away from you before you appreciate it. You don't know what you got, till it's gone.
Chip Maxham
ABC 13 Meteorologist
The short answer is that no one really knows. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t make some guesses.
A couple of years ago, a few of my meteorology friends turned me on to something called analog forecasting. This method of forecasting is much different than what we use for the short-term (5 to 7 day) forecasts. The short-term forecast uses a combination of data from satellites, radars, surface stations, weather balloons, and mathematical simulations.
Analog forecasting attempts to use a previous (or historical) weather pattern to figure out what will happen in the future. For example, if the summer was very hot (or cold, or wet, or dry), what does that tell us for the following winter?
So, let’s take a shot at it.
In Virginia, both June and August had temperatures just slightly above normal, but July was very cool. It was the 4th coolest July in the last 100 years. So we went back into the archives and looked for similar patterns from previous years.
But instead of looking at just the temperature pattern in Virginia, we looked at the global weather pattern that produced those conditions. There are a number of atmospheric pressure and oceanic temperature fluctuations that we rely on to get a feel for how the atmosphere and oceans are behaving. So for this example, we picked five of these fluctuations. You can use your favorite search engine to learn more about them, but for brevity, I will give a quick listing of them:
North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO)
Southern Oscillation Index (SOI)
November
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