Rain

Describes motivation process for creativity with emphasis on intrinsic motivation by Corey K Katir

When you’re trudging through the pouring rain to the office, it seems like the Earth possesses an infinite amount of water, a not-insignificant amount of which is dripping down your collar. But when you see an image like this one, produced by the USGS, it hammers home the reality of the situation: the water’s all spread out in a very thin layer, like a millimeter of frosting on a cake. If you gathered all the world’s water—from oceans, lakes, groundwater, water vapor, everything—into a sphere, it would have a diameter of 860 miles. That’s the distance between Salt Lake City and Topeka, Kansas.

That’s still a fairly big sphere, when you think about it: that same water spread out in an even layer across the United States would leave us under a 90-mile-deep lake. But it isn’t nearly as big as you might expect, looking at our blue marble in photos from space or dipping your toes in the Atlantic. To boot, very little of that water—less than 4%—is freshwater, and the vast majority of that is locked up in glaciers and ice caps. We’ve got just a tiny fraction of that sphere at our disposal; …

The plane pitches violently as it plows through the milky innards of a cloud bank. A commercial pilot would fly high above these clouds over Californiaas Sierra Nevada Range, but this 63-foot Gulfstream-1 seems to invite the turbulence. Updrafts grab hold of the aircraft and shove it up even as the pilot noses it down. In the back of the plane, atmospheric chemist Kimberly Prather wears headphones to muffle the roar of the propellers. She steadies herself with a hand on an instrument rack and focuses on the bobbing screen of her laptop. Readings from the clouds spool across it.

Those numbers tell Prather that these winter clouds are cold and heavy, a30 degrees Fahrenheit and just over 100 percent relative humidity. Yet despite being 62 degrees below the freezing point of water, the cloud droplets remain stubbornly liquid. As long as they donat form ice crystals, these clouds wonat shed more than a few flakes of snow over the Sierrasa 13,000-foot peaks. They are typical clouds, teasers that wonat drop much of anything.

After two hours of flying, though, something changes. The voice of another researcher crackles over Pratheras headset: aIce!a The plane has entered a cloud layer where suddenly every droplet is frozen. Pratheras instrumentaa tangle of metal tubes, wires, and airtight chambers nicknamed Shirleyatick-tick-ticks as its laser blasts apart hundreds of microscopic cloud particles, one by one, that are drawn in from the air outside. The size and composition of each particle flash across Pratheras monitor. The specks at the heart of those ice crystals are high in aluminum, iron, silicon, and titanium, the chemical signatures of dust not from California but from faraway deserts in Asia or even Africa. Thereas something else in the crystals too: carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus, telltale signs of biological cells…

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Image: A high-altitude balloon is readied for a 2011 launch at a NASA facility in New Mexico. It carried microbe collectors up to 120,000 feet.

By early June of 2009, Joshua Wurman was exhausted and discouraged. For weeks, the nomadic teams of VORTEX2 (the second Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment) had crisscrossed the Midwest in pursuit of the violent thunderstorms that can generate tornadoes. Yet all that he and the other meteorologists had encountered so far were a few rain showers. With more than 100 participants, 11 radar trucks, 13 instrument-laden vehicles, an unmanned plane, and millions of dollars from the National Science Foundation in play, the most ambitious tornado field study ever was at risk of failing. The weather was just too nice.

But when the scientists finally intercepted their first a”tornado of the season in Goshen County, Wyoming, it offered an amazing coup. For the first time, they were able to capture detailed data on the entire life cycle of a a”tornado, from gestation to birth to demise. Analysis of information from this storm and dozens of lesser intercepts in 2009 and 2010, combined with new insights from computer simulations, may finally answer the researchersa a”biggest question: What triggers a tornado? Zeroing in on how tornadoes get going could lengthen warning times from the current, dangerously short average of 13 minutes and also lower the rate of false alarms. DISCOVER recently a”spoke with Wurman, who has probably collected data on more tornadoes than any other scientist, about his theory of how tornadoes form, the twisters that claimed 548 lives in 2011, and a recent storm that flat-out awed him.

What makes tornadoes so unpredictable?a(c)
We know the fundamentals of how supercell thunderstormsathe ones that produce tornadoesaform. We know that there need to be certain conditions of temperature, relative humidity, and wind speeds at different altitudes. What we donat really understand very well is why only 25 percent of the supercells make tornadoes and when in their life cycle they do it: Why did that particular supercell make a tornado now, not 15 a”minutes ago, or 15 minutes from now? The reason we drive 15,000 miles a year to catch 10 tornadoes is because we donat know which supercells are going to make them or when…

Image: Wurman in Battle Pass, Wyoming, in November. Behind him is the Doppler on Wheels, the mobile radar truck he invented. Photograph by Beth Wald

aThe river came up to right where weare sitting, and the waters were more than two feet deep,a Peter Goodwin tells me in the driveway of his ranch-style house perched on the banks of the Balonne River in St. George, a village of 3,500 in eastern Australia. It is a drizzly Sunday afternoon in April, three months after a devastating flood that drenched a landmass the size of France and Germany combined and isolated the town after the rain-swollen river rose to a record 45 feet.

Agricultural areas like St. George were hardest hit by the relentless rains and overflowing rivers that swamped roads, cut off power lines, washed away vineyards and fruit orchards, drowned thousands of head of cattle and other livestock, and covered homes and everything inside them in thick layers of sediment and mud. Shell-shocked residents are still digging out from under the debris.

aThatas the hard part of the floodathe aftermath,a says Goodwin, 60, a crusty, compactly built man with piercing blue eyes and calloused hands who works as an operations manager for the local municipality and has been staying with his grown daughter while he makes his home habitable again. aYou get a lot of help during the flood, but then everyone settles back into their routine. There are a lot of houses down there that are still empty,a he adds, gesturing toward the riverbank. aAnd they will be for a long time to comea…

Even in the age of satellite imagery, commercial flight, modern medicine, and plenty of other perks unavailable to the explorers of earlier ages, there are still some crannies on Earth left unexplored. But that’s because exploring them is an extreme endeavor. The race to get to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, the deepest place on Earth, now includes billionaires Richard Branson and James Cameron, each working on specialized submersibles. Eliza Strickland of IEEE Spectrum traveled to the epicenter of the activity near the Mariana Islands and reports back in a fascinating feature.

It’s a great Friday afternoon adventure story, so we’ll get you started with this excerpt:

As the battered little boat slides down a 3-meter ocean swell into the next trough, Chris Welsh grits his teeth and peers out into the storm. Sheets of rain pummel the dark windows of the bridge, and a Micronesian sailor wrestles with the wheel. Itas past midnight on a July night and weare bobbing over the almost 11 kilometers of water that fill the deepest abyss on Earth, the Mariana Trench. Welsh is leading a small party of engineers, scientists, and adventurers under …

Thank god for air friction. Without it, falling rain would smack into our heads at hundreds of miles per hour. But friction works both ways—falling raindrops also slow down the movement of air molecules in the atmosphere. A new paper in Science calculated that raindrops dissipate as much kinetic energy from the atmosphere as air turbulence.A Granted, at 1.8 watts per square meter and 0.75% of the atmosphere’s total kinetic energy, that’s not very much. What’s surprising is that rain drops are pulling more than their weight, as they make up only 0.01% of the atmosphere’s mass.

Researchers calculated the kinetic energy dissipated by a single raindrop and put it together with precipitation rates around the world. Since satelliteA precipitationA data also show the height from which rain started falling, the researchers could plug how far raindrops fellA into their energy calculations. It all adds up across the whole globe: the researchers estimate the total rate of energyA dissipation from rainfall to beA 1015A Watts. That’s a lot of energy, but still unlikely to affect major weather phenomena like hurricanes or tornados.

[via Nature News]

Image via ShutterstockA

 You might need an umbrella if you are outside after lunch today.The National Weather Service predicts a 20 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms this afternoon through the evening

 This afternoon was unseasonably hot, but it wasn’t the kind of record-setting heat Denver has become accustomed to this spring.

A little sun, a shower or two, maybe a few thunderstorms are all on Denver’s weather menu today.

Snow is coming down hard in parts of the high country this evening, with rain on the Front Range expected to continue into the evening and expected to linger over the Denver metro region through the weekend.

Denver fell one degree short of a record high for May 10 when the mercury peaked at 85 degrees just before 2:50 p.m. Thursday, but today’s high temperature is expected to be 34 degrees cooler as rain moves in.

Winter weather has returned to the Colorado mountains today, and some areas could see up to five inches of new snow.

A report on Northern Ireland’s precious built heritage which was due to take 11 years is actually likely to take around three decades to complete, it has emerged.

A report on Northern Ireland’s precious built heritage which was due to take 11 years is actually likely to take around three decades to complete, it has emerged.

Hard-hitting DoE road safety campaigns have been credited with reducing road deaths in Northern Ireland to their lowest level since records began in 1931.

Derelict buildings in Londonderry could be next in line for a major spruce-up.

The lives of thousands of people in developing countries could be saved by a water filtration system designed by a Northern Ireland student that has struck gold at an international competition.

A government body tasked with promoting the environment has come under fire after racking up hundreds of expensive and polluting flights.

The first of the Stormont Executive’s hat-trick of major roads projects — the A8 to Larne — has been given the go-ahead.

A new chapter in Northern Ireland’s search for a sustainable future has been opened with the completion of a hydroelectric scheme in Antrim, marking it as a first for Northern Ireland.

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