friday with this meteor that exploded over russia sent just a couple of things you know it's going to probably be a couple of years at least in terms of sifting through information really understanding it a little bit better but a couple of things that have come to light is there was of course a different asteroid an unrelated piece of rock that went to between the earth and some of its satellites no relationship they were moving in different directions but the  and let's face it the not as though they're perfectly round shapes but approximately ten meters and kind of given as the general agreement things that are ten meters or so in diameter about that why  what thirty three feet that and smaller are considered meteoroids bigger is an asteroid this one the estimate i've seen different estimates and that's like i said will be you know continuing to find out more about this sort of coming years about fifteen to seventeen meters ok so we're pushing you know maybe fifty feet so of course zooming into the atmosphere at some speed between maybe thirty five thousand maybe as much as forty five thousand miles an hour when you see and hopefully you saw that one all those different videos of this thing glowing out there now if you think about it some of these images of this thing that was glowing were at least one hundred miles away now you have an object that's maybe fifty feet wide seen from one hundred miles away what you were seeing was not glowing rock the rock was glowing but that's not what you were seeing because you won't see that  will iraq that far away what you are seeing is the air compressed in front of it going that past it compresses the air and it actually basically causes all the molecules to break apart and they start giving off their energy in the form of white so you have and of course pieces of it landed and that will be part of the story figuring out you know what what its composition was and you know for me i very excited only because that's the first time something of this nature has been caught on film and i expect that's going to be the case going forward because apparently there are more of those cellphone things and so forth i mean basically nothing goes on witness o reports compared to what they were prior to the you know all of these various mobile devices very few because somebody will take a picture of it and immediately you can start to identify it mean once it's not so anyway so there's a little bit about that and so we'll move on to snow i do love snow is probably the reason i became a meteorologist because i was probably in this age range great snowstorms love to build snow men wanted to know when the next snow storm was coming and then in the prime of my snow building years my family moved me from my failure to connecticut it would snow but it would melt and there was snow that it doesn't mean we spent so anyway so i wanted to know when it was going to snow and so probably from the time i was eight or nine i was really interested and by the time i was about eleven or twelve i was going to be a weatherman and all the grown ups patted me on the head and said that's very nice so well and i'm still learning to be a weatherman and that's why it's still in learning process that's why there are still in the forecast so talking about so we're going to kind of deal with a few different things as far as that's concerned we will talk about storms you know just a little bit about how they work and so forth because i find that fascinating and we'll talk about how the landscape affects that because that's what's going on right now and so we'll talk a little bit about that i love to play in the snow i'm guessing most of you like to play in the snow and ice even love to shovel snow now there have been a couple of winters were my love decreased ok but i still love it and actually just before we started the program thomas knows that i was outside and he said oh no you can see there's a camera here to show the parking lights i wasn't looking at the parking lot i was actually looking at the snow crystals on the railing they are great snow crystals out there tonight ok so anyway we'll talk a little bit about those as well so i love snow is not the name of this program it's no wonder the looking glass is actually in the program so just briefly in terms of you know why am i here i certainly wouldn't have thought thirty years ago that i'd be here at the jericho historical society so the fairbanks  museum i just kind of tripped into a program that had just started there months before i graduated something called eye on the sky and well i hadn't graduated yet but my arm got twisted and they said oh you know you can do that you can get up at four o'clock in the morning your senior year in college and bright idea was that anyway so the fairbanks you know museum this is founded by franklin who was an amazing observer of nature of all sorts and that tradition certainly continues at the museum today but i also wouldn't be here if there hadn't been this amazing program this eye in the sky program this partnership with vermont public radio museum which continues you know it's grown in recent years hopefully in the afternoons you sometimes catch the eye in the night sky program and we now have a facebook page and there's all kinds of things that we're talking about doing so it's really exciting really rewarding to be able to have this kind of program they still hear from many people who you know who grew up here maybe they've moved away there is no place in the country and i keep hearing there's no place in the country that has the kind of weather forecasts they were able to do here so very pleased about that let me get back briefly to the museum because there's a wonderful connection to franklin fairbanks i'm not related to him b dark in here but he actually donated some of his images to the museum and there's he can't really see it in here but there are some wonderful descriptions of how where you know when those snowflakes were taking photographs are only part of the story his meticulous record keeping was absolutely you know important in terms of being able to keep track of that it will illustrate some of that as we go along through it so that the first thing that i wanted to talk about what makes a snowstorm in case of there's a classic picture of a swirl of clouds quite honestly that could have been the storm a couple of weeks ago i don't really know that many nor'easters look like nor'easters we've had them since they ever coined that phrase but underneath that structure ok the clouds you know they've got this nice little pattern to them but let's talk about what's going on underneath you know this weather map kind of stuff these l's lower pressure we've got some weather friends here so let me just briefly talk because the structure actually tells us a little bit about the kind of snow you get at various points so critical to storms they need warm air and cold air been doing some programs of the museum with schoolkids talking about the fact that snowstorms need warm air it seems counter intuitive but warm air has the energy it carries a lot more moisture than cold air so that's actually a critical thing also and i've done this as an experiment if you can in a water tank get cold  cold water in warm water to meet it's not that warm water just goes over the top of the cold water it actually bubbles and boils as there's very vigorous motion in the atmosphere and so where the contrast is between cold and where the qual grow wonderfully that's where you get storms now there are two pieces to the storms that that in terms of what makes a snowstorm so they have something they call it the warm conveyor belt but you don't have to be too fussy about this channel of warm air gets lifted up into the atmosphere warm air cools off it turns into clouds and it's a great place to get snow so it's basically lifting up over the cold air and so that there is the warm front right here so this section of the store that's the real productive section of the storm this is where it snows one to three inches an hour like it was doing actually in kansas city heard a quick little thing here as i was driving over because they had a report of thunder snow out there the clouds actually them the best comment that i heard in that particular story there's always thunder snow in the summertime because every rain drop that's ever fallen on your head started as a snowflake so in a under store it's snowing in fact it has to do with the snowflakes themselves they're much better at creating a static electricity charge and the one of the studies that's now going on is that they're starting to be able to predict whether a storm is going to have a lot of lightning or less like me depending on the snowflake structure excuse me snowflake structure in the top of the clouds so sorry i get kind of excited about th anyway and and the other thing and you can probably see some snow crystals in there that is eighty no flake just a fussy little difference no crystals are the individual pieces they all get stuck together and that's what makes the bigger puffy or snowflakes that you see so crystals are really tiny that's why he had to use a microscope ok now there is of course another section of the storm that's actually also very fascinating critical it's the cold air that actually goes underneath the warm air and then gets lifted up to the top so we're talking about this section of the store the nice thing i found this wonderful satellite picture because you can actually see this structure here this is basically the cold air is actually being lifted up to the top so it's cooling up the cold air gets even colder and so one of the marvelous things it will see a little bit more about it in terms of of wilson but he talked about you know temperatures that would be more ideal to create you know large snowflakes and that type of thing so this section of the of the storm is where we can get snow that again it might snow into two an hour but the snow is very dry very fluffy aren't now in terms of wilson badly you know you know here he is you know spending just hours and hours always looking for those marvelous crystals and so here's a couple of examples and it ties in to temperature here so first of all as he's taking these images the word blizzard is a relatively new term i think it first appeared in an iowa newspaper eight hundred seventy teens in the light northwest wind up so no this cold temperatures and these are mostly the plate type crystals not a lot of you know decorative edges and so forth and in that storm i had a record here at the museum we had seven inches of snow in that blizzard so here's another blizzard the blizzard of february first one thousand nine hundred eight very cold average two very small in size  again mostly these plate type crystals strong northwest wind in this blizzard we had two inches of snow like a sensenbrenner new term people love to use a bouquet ah here we have a great storm the great storm actually this is a great story i actually talked about this just a little bit ago on the p r because this was part of a month this month heavier eight hundred ninety nine featured arctic air that went down all the way into florida it was two below zero and in tallahassee ok so same storm so it's a cold store we still have plate type crystals but we have a few of these these are sometimes called cake i love this a portion of them came out of a clear sky i've been out and sometimes i like to do moonlight cross country skiing and one of the marvelous things as when this happens and essentially what goes on if you've ever experienced this where you can basically see the sky above it it's still snowing the moisture is skipping the process of going into making a cloud why bother it's only going to come down anyway so the moisture immediately starts creating crystals which then fall so it just kind skips the cloud process this great stored produce three and a half inches ok now just to kind of go through the whole bit of a winter storm is that it isn't always snow it's never always been snow there was a time this one of the people who used to work at the museum she she said to me well i never remember it raining in the winter it never used to rain in the winter he said no rain here i don't remember that why would you there was so memorable out you know i mean it's like wow it rained ok so just kind of getting to the idea that all of these winter storms have these interesting structures where you have to have some warm air but if there is a nuff warm air it'll start melting the snow flips now there's just a little bit of warm air you get rain drops but then there's enough cold air that they freeze before they little bit of cold air so in other words the ground let's say is twenty five degrees but if you go up one hundred feet it may be thirty three or thirty four the ground cold so the rain freezes on the ground you get that glaze of ice on things  and if there's a it's one of those situations that this air is quite warm in this area quite cold doesn't happen very often but it can be disastrous if you remember the ice storm back in ninety eight there were places that had four or five inches of ice and just a tremendous tremendous storm and k and again you know this happens in this intersection where the warm air the cold air are meeting here here's some ice pellets bouncing off th of the truck they are in here of course some images from that damaging ice storm ok now snowflake bentley one of the things that i marvel that was in he published a paper back in one thousand and one talking about the reason that snow crystals had their different shapes he was absolutely certain that it had to do with what was going on in the clouds he just had no way to study it in one thousand nine you don't have an apparatus to be able to do so but that was he wrote a long discussion about this and it was published in a scientific journal talking about you know basically proposing the idea that the structure in the cloud would determine the types of of snow crystals indeed you know his meticulous records meant that he noticed that it different temperatures even though at ground level he did notice that there was a definite relationship between temperature and snow crystal so these are temperatures in the cloud it's very cold in the cloud so the fahrenheit scales on the bottom so you know well below zero you're going to get twenty plates and a few columns they're going to be kind but at a temperature right around five degrees above zero fifty minus fifteen celsius that is like ideal temperature for snow to grow rapidly into these large fluffy you know a well you get all these points sticking out there obviously not going to stick together very well so you get very dry very fluffy snow as it warms up other things get mixed in there are of some of these before but you'll also get and i don't know if you've ever noticed these i'm always looking at my jacket sleep when i'm outside but you know once you start seeing needles mix in you know to me i say up there some warmer air coming in you know with my forecasting thing you still will get some small dendrites all the way out here but again this is the ideal temperature well now we actually have we have ways that we can predict more or less what the temperature is in the cloud where the snow is for me and that gives us a better opportunity to make a forecast that might be able to tell us you know more so than than when i started thirty years ago you can have let's just use an even number an inch of water coming out of the cloud now if it's really wet snow you might only get eight or ten inches of snow if it's really dry snow that same amount of stuff out of the clouds to produce forty inches of snow so the storm is doing the same thing it's just a difference in the temperature in terms of the kind of snow that's piling up so that's why sometimes you hear those you know i've been taken to task many times you know you know we're expecting eight to sixteen inches of snow and every once in a while somebody says well which is it eight or sixteen and it sounds you know like i don't know i'm not terribly certain but it's not really that is there is that range of  probably some of you that have driven here tonight might be able to attest to the fact that it didn't so the same amount in all locations around here ok so here are some wonderful these dendrite these large ones but notice the temperatures warmer thirty two degrees and probably i think he's intending to say that drop down to seventeen another great snowstorm of three and a half inches so again working groups well went to a little too fast but working with  those those larger flakes so homegrown snow which is pretty much what we're getting right now this is not a store instead and i think you can probably make this out i mean here's the green mountains and i've kind of got this focused on let's see there should be another image that will appear here if there is so here's jericho actually right here there is mt mansfield right here so what we're talking about is the air running into the mountain and of course it is forced to go up and over the mountain any time the air goes up it gets cooler if there's enough moisture it turns in the clouds and you get extra amounts of snow if the wind stays in the same  after hour maybe for a couple of days you get some spots that just keep giving the same heavy snow in this situation you know by the time this finishes up we'll probably have snow fall ranging from a trace to three feet now a monkey can make that work out and i have nothing against monkeys it's just that that that kind of fussy difference why we're still learning about this you know is it's one of things that keeps me coming back every morning trying to figure this mystery out you know what exactly is going to happen but you do have air that rises it creates clouds and then of course it snows underneath in fact it's so particular in terms of the kinds of snow that we get that on this map this is actually no it doesn't say here although i guess it does say fresh snowfall i'm going to block that out in future presentations because if you look at that you could easily say oh that's a map of the mountains that's the terrain because that's exactly how tuned snowfall is to terrain we can see the champlain valley right here with lesser amounts of snow and then here is are the green  mount mansfield that's camel's hump that's j p i mean it's that exact that you can actually pick out specific mountain ranges and mountains right on here the only exception lake ontario sits in the spot right here and right next to lake thinking that it is the region it's in lower clouds ok the clouds are very tall in this case they just keep getting manufactured right on the sides of the mountains so we can get lots of snow of the situation now another thing to consider in in terms of snow fall here are actually the great lakes now lake champlain it does contribute to snowfall in a very minor way and if for a very obvious reason i hope that little blue streak that's lake champlain this is lake ontario one of but not the largest of the great lakes it's the size of vermont when once i say that because i know how much you travel around vermont there's a lot of amount to travel around this is a lake the size of iran and it's just one of five and so you get snow off of these lakes and depending on the wind direction some of it falls here and this particular image you've got wind that's coming this way so you can see the streak of clouds here's lake ontario you can see the st cloud coming from there continuing all the way to the coast of maine where they are galleries opening so there's just slightly bigger picture of the great lakes you don't have to worry about although the language and so forth the bottom line here is that the moisture is sometimes if the wind is right connects from this lake to this lake to this lake and suddenly you have very moist and cold air going over relatively warm lake it adds even more moisture and boy does it snow a few years ago there were a couple of locations just east of lake ontario that reported ten feet of snow in a four day period and heat of snow i lived out in pots am new york and they don't get a lot of this lake effect snow but every once in a while the wind gets just right and i can recall having you know a three or four foot snow storm out there and the other feature here is you know i mean there is the cloud band the comes here but you'll notice there's a kind of a clump of clouds right in this location in the southern vermont down here and the reason i wanted to indicate that is it's a great example of the moisture coming from the lake and then running that much beauty was gone without leaving a record behind him that's what he did he found a way to record that so i just he's one of my heroes ok all right so going from the past to the future does snow have a future take you know one k i just heard there was a paper published and i'll just briefly mention that the paper  hypothesized that with a warmer climate we would have more blizzards and less snow fall now if i understand mathematics if you get let's say in boston you get two blizzards let's see if they'll be modest blizzards in boston two blizzards you would get let's say eighteen inches in each of them boston's average annual snow fall is thirty six inches so they got thirty six inches of snow how is that going to be less than thirty six inches of snow in other words if you can't have it both ways you can't have lots of big blizzards and then have less snow fall is not going to work it also would indicate that when it was colder we didn't have was and that's not true either so it's an idea that's been floated out there much like well there's been that idea that there are more hurricanes because of climate change when they actually did the numbers there are it's an idea you know it's one of those well that makes sense but science can't just go well it makes sense so that's the way it is i mean that's how the greeks used to do their science they would think about it if it made sense that was the way it was but like you know i mean the earth is in the center of the solar system it makes sense when you start doing the science part of it instead of just making sense then you find out all kinds of other things so i'm not disparaging the idea that we should hypothesize and look into these things i just think that we need to do all of our science as far as that goes so thinking about snow i mean we had here's what we have tons of snow we have years where we don't get very much snow so what's the deal well first of all in terms of snow we have a good spot for snow here these are all different storm tracks you notice where they meet their lives right here and now these are these are not railroad tracks so storms can go wherever they want to go but there are reasons why the map looks this way storms need warm and cold air as we mentioned earlier well what do we have we have canada in this wonderful shield and it's really flat and the cold air can sit here for a long time so we have a great supply of cold air we have mountains that separate that cold air from the warm air just offshore is sitting out over the ocean it's just a great spot now it doesn't mean that every winter we're going to get gr snow in fact if you'll recall a few years ago i refuse to repeat them the media name of all the snow they got in washington d c back in two thousand and nine but you may know what i'm talking about something  anyway but that was the storm track that particular year and so all the stores and everybody here except commenting about it you know all star they're all going out to the south and my brother lives and just outside of d c he's going color here that's a ten year running mean what it was we just take the ten years and we average and we move it forward we move it forward it just takes this out because what you can see in this up and down stuff is that we get so many years and then it doesn't snow and then it does snow in the doesn't snow it's just highly variable so if you're expecting to get a lot of snow every single year it doesn't happen and it really never happens ok well at least during modern recordkeeping times i suppose during the glaciers and so forth  so what i wanted to you to note is that so we were somewhere around seventy five or eighty inches as an average here and at the end of the period we are somewhere around ninety inches so it's been getting snow  that's actually and this is this is a great thing ok so it's getting snow here of course everybody wants to meet and answer the question i wish i could why is it getting snow here i don't know but science has to start with get really snowy winters up here in another one right here just one that was a little less where is that period of time it actually comes out right around one thousand nine hundred seventy one there were poor winters in a row they were phenomenally snow nephews what their recollection of their childhood for snow was it was brown half the time and their birthday one of their birthdays is january thirty first and sometimes she didn't even have snow for her birthday so your perception of what it used to do is often colored by some brief momentary changes in these sort of things so i just find that fascinating ok so who's the boss the ocean the boss the ocean contains so much heat energy that the cycles of the oceans are probably de key to predicting whether short term and long term and some fascinating things are starting to appear oh i hate some of these names just call it the p t o it will make you sound smart in the pacific to coddle oscillation who think what it is is that the pacific ocean for reasons that we don't understand goes through these phases of being colder and then warmer and right now shifting back to colder and these are it's about a thirty year cycle ok so that's the pacific ocean the  but the atlantic is also busy the atlanta even though it's smaller and maybe because it's smaller we don't really know but it has a longer period it's more like a sixty seventy year period where so you can see it was warmer here it got colder all through here and it kind of peaked out terms of warmth right now we think in the next ten to fifteen years is going to start cooling off again this also may be related to hurricanes terms of the warmth of the atlantic ok so we put them together so p t o plus calles ok so it's down here it's up here it's down here it's up there what you want to do is to look at the temperatures which are down here and up we were down here and up here they're connected these are u s temperature so the temperatures in the united states vary depending on the ocean temperatures that surround the united states in a lot of ways that just simply makes sense it makes sense but they've actually done the studies to make the connection the other big player is the sun the sun sunspots you maybe you've heard of the least a little bit about the sun cycle that every eleven years there's a lot of sunspots and then they drop off and then eleven years later we get another peak and that's what this up and down line is in through here it starts back in about six thousand eight hundred in this particular one that i've just found one that went through two thousand just to give you just that cycle idea and these are images of the sun kind of through that cycle where it's an active sun seasonal kind of messy here this is a blank sun things are really boring there and then it gets active again so  we look at this first of all there is this flat spot sixteen hundred and actually six hundred ten galileo is out there he uses a telescope he see spots on the sun he wasn't the first one the chinese at least the chinese were the first ones i wrote it down i don't know if you know anything about the chinese astronomers the chinese solar astronomers selected specifically by the emperor it's not a position you refuse their job was to stare at the sun until they went blind however they could still see the sun in fact that's the only thing they see and they actually see spots on the sun i don't try this at home they're starting to do all of the serving and suddenly no sunspots for decades well it's ours kind of cold to go out anyway sixteen hundreds into the early seventeen hundreds the little ice age glaciers were advancing it starts to pick up again oh it drops back down again around the turn of the century turn of the last century i forget one thousand nine hundred colder there then the highest numbers that we can see in terms of sunspots where do they occur in the second half of the twentieth century when the temperatures were warmer in fact here's a study done by dr willie soon from the smithsonian observatory occasion in which he's looking decreases it goes down then it goes back up again it's been going up and actually it's been going up since the seventy's hundreds so and so of the temperatures so this was this is this is ok is this december two thousand and seven one of the things that nasa has developed and a few other agencies as well predicting the universe and spots why when there are a lot of sunspots there's a lot of energy coming off from the sun this is going to affect satellites communication all of our things that we seem to depend on these days would get shut down if a huge burst of energy came from the sun it would seriously disrupt satellite communications ok so their prediction back in two thousand and seven was pretty even more powerful peak and obviously that got people's attention this why the way was the first time they ever even tried to predict it by understanding how the sun works they were able to you know make a reasonable prediction based on the information they had then in two thousand and nine they made this prediction in which here was the previous one no this was not going to be quite a strong  i didn't grab the latest image which they just made a prediction earlier this month so we're near the peak of the sunspot right now which is somewhere down in here we don't know what's going on with the sun and that's got some people really puzzling over this because the last time that the somewhat really quiet the temperature dropped and when the sun went super quiet we have a little ice age so these are things that require understanding but it's not something easy it's not like you can go to the sun and study it so we have a lot of challenges ahead of us to understand what all that means one other thing that goes on is the length of a solar cycle it's so we say eleven years it actually varies from about nine to thirteen longer cycles so here cycle length over here in this is doubled so instead of eleven twenty two would be the average so short cycles  and so that this is the temperature short cycles warmer temperature long cycles lower temperature and this last solar cycle was somewhere around twelve and a half years old a longer than average ok so if you have snow i wouldn't be worried over the next twenty or thirty years i think we're going to have lots of shoveling to do but i don't we're going to be snowy every winter just like you saw i mean we're the only only state in doing with it isn't on the ocean so worry moved a little bit from that moisture and so what winds are patterning here actually or my favorite phrases that i heard from general years ago  the storm goes by it clears up it's nice and sunny you know nice cyclical pattern here after a storm goes by it doesn't clear up so my my friend would say yes clearing up cloudy today flanks of the mountains but you have all of that here that's coming from either the champlain valley or up in the richelieu valley and it has to come up hill to you which means the air is rising which means you're getting files which means you're getting snow the other thing about the local snow and some of the images  that snowflake that we had where most of them are dendrites most of them are the pointy ones they don't tend to pack down so with a relatively small amount of moisture you can get lots of inches of snow but yes the that particular airflow is ideal on this side of the green mountains and all the way up on towards say all those so very often people for instance today have got here they are somebody  yeah local weather and in fact local weather of all sorts has pretty much been the story of my education here for the past thirty plus years and i love it and we're very fortunate you know with the size and scale of vermont and our surrounding spades people called me and they tell me what the weather's doing and they tell me when i'm wrong they told me this morning and i don't know if you do the facebook thing but on our facebook thing you know we had a map and it stopped at the canadian what i learned from all of these people is there's another lovely woman she she lives in the heart in harlem vermont not too far from norwich in hanover she she sends me you know she told me her temperature and how much snow fell and so forth but she describes the weather now i can look at numbers all day long but it doesn't beat somebody describing you know boy that was really biting this morning that's a completely different message that it's thirty two degrees strong hurricane just for the area well you know it and in fact you know new york city's in a tough spot to get a hurricane into just where the coastline is shaped and that's why it's a very rare thing the last one was an eighteen twenty one i eighteen twenty one storm was a similar one in strength now doesn't mean it's going to be another two hundred years for the next one no but you know it may be a two hundred year type of storm but in terms of strength the star one of the things that they've been doing is they've been trying to you know ok that's a an excellent idea if you've got more heat in our atmosphere it would make sense that you'd have stronger storms so they take a look at it and one of the things they've been developing is a way to basically create a number of the total energy from all the hurricanes and that number has act decreased over the past ten years ok not a lot i mean you know but as i showed  ocean is near one of its warm periods well when the atlantic is warm we on the east coast tend to see more hurricanes in the northeast so the last time that was the situation one nine hundred forty s and i can fifty's actually what started in hundred thirty eight ok that period of time very active for hurricanes and then the next thirty years not very active now we're in an active thirty year period so it seems to be cyclical you know i mean for our lifetimes you know three cycles that's ninety years that's that's it ok but for the weather that's that's a really there what's a just a little glimpse in time you know we i would love it if we had excellent records that went back to you know one thousand eight hundred a year but one thousand you something where you could really see the details were just i still don't think i i often think especially when i get weather forecasts like today that we're still in the infancy of understanding this whole process we're much better off than we were before we had much better warnings and all that kind of thing i'm actually tremendously excited because we now have a way of studying all this stuff in getting better numbers yeah yeah ok so what if and i don't know some point some as anybody ever found the remnants of a weather balloon ok because every once in a while you we will find one of the woods and what you usually find is this beat up styrofoam box and it may have some stuff in it in a weather balloon and they're set up from seventy locations in the united states twice a day nearest place to here is albany new york up goes the balloon at seven o'clock in morning seven o'clock in the evening and it has on a little radio and it measures the temperature it measures the air pressure to measure the humidity but because it's in the balloon and it has a radio transponder and the wind is moving it it calculates when by how far it's moved over a particular period of time and so what we get from those balloons are all the information about what's going on all the layers of the atmosphere so when i showed you the picture of the snowstorm where the air was going up at the top party atmosphere we didn't know what it was doing before weather balloons and now we have information all through those different layers and they're now developing they have a system of satellites that use laser beams they're not going to dorrie but the laser beam as it goes down through the atmosphere actually picks up on the motion of particles in our atmosphere and so they're now able to see weather balloons that's great over the land but the earth is three quarters water so now they're getting more information out over the oceans which is just making you know a even better set of information to start with so that's what they're up to they're measuring it all the way up through what we call it operational forecaster who's a daily weather forecaster is that i'm mostly looking at observations as opposed to a computer model or who would be you know taking information putting it in projecting it out fifty hundred years into the future so in some of the work has been done based on what's actually happening is that the temperatures are certainly as warm as they have been since we've been keeping moderate records  the question is is that created by human influences or created by ocean influences of the sun is it a combination it's a wonderful presentation by one of the people who founded the weather channel dr joe the whale and leo talked he actually took all those possibilities he took human influence on the land in terms of you know pavement and buildings and so forth he talked about the carbon dioxide talked about the oceans he talked about  the sun and he basically approximated how much heat of them had as an input so this isn't you know anything in terms of my opinion but he approached it the way that i would approach it in he said that it was probably about twenty five percent to be fumin activity so that was you know so that's something to to kind of go from now is it more than that or less than that we don't have all the information but it was a really interesting way to try to this stuff it's not like you can separate and it's not like you can test it out in the lab which you and i guess you know sometimes i hesitate in it offering too much of  climate because i'm not sure i'm not sure an opinion is going to serve any of us but i think it's important at least for me that at my house i'm the only one of my street with a real mower not a i'm in fact i had some kids a stop i was out doing the front lawn and they said what happened to your mo so i absolutely you know i think i wish things were opinionated and that type of thing i think it's obvious to me that taking better care of the only planet that we seem to have only makes sense so i have no argument with any of that but i also when people throw out speculation and treat it as science i do have a problem with that so when somebody speculates about the strengths of storms and so forth a little of this speculation i kind of think this might be what happened but that's very different the doing a scientific study of it i feel very strongly that that eventually science will without i mean let's face did what level of detail does the computer model give you too much really i mean like you said there are several commute computer models it would take me probably about forty eight hours to take a look at th mornings information i mean as a as a single you know you know basically the way our weather operation is museum we have you know forecaster to forecasters the national weather service they've got twelve guys on one shift which is great  but what i find that really helpful is that the computer models basically and they're often called computer guidance and that's a really good way to think about it they model the atmosphere they give us unguided say oh it's going to do this ok well but like you noted i mean it's our local weather so i can tell you there was no computer in the world that said that there were going to be twenty four inches of snow this morning and  that that just doesn't happen on a computer the computer doesn't see that so what instead it was hitting is it certainly said that he airflow would be right that there would be a lot of snow on the western side of the mountains and at that point truly forecasters do a bit of guesswork but based on experience we know that when the air flow is just like that there are places that are going to get six twelve fifteen inches of snow something it depends on how long the wind's going to be in that direction that type of thing so it there are some computer models that are run every hour there are some of the major models around every six hours ok so that's the major models that we look at so every six hours we get a new guess on the computer know it's nothing official it's actually saw a quote from somebody at the weather channel saying that it was a great way to get attention you know there there there surely there is a very specific reason why hurricanes are named out in the ocean there can be more than one tropical system of the time and for shipping in particular it's really important that they know which storm they're talking about in terms of the strength of the storm the direction that it's moving on the land it doesn't matter whether you call it backwards and down in connecticut and hartford the channel three in hartford has been dealing with your storms since i was probably i think i was in high school and they still do it they're the only was they're doing what they're doing well of course now whether tails kind of lead and they don't even use the same name so like i said you know there isn't a real particular that actually was the thing that i probably will use and it was one of the first things that happened to me when i was very first very first year on the p r i made a forecast and said well looks like tomorrow you know i think so one of the ones that they actually still you and it usually beats the computers is that if there's due on the grass rain will never pass now there are a lot of farmers in the summer wanting to know if they need to cut hay if they need to get it and so forth that's one of the