Vapor Manipulations
In the 1940s, GE and government researchers were trying to figure out how to weaken the destructive power of hurricanes. Part of that work involved building an understanding of how ice crystals form in clouds. These animations come from a 1947 film showing scientists making snow in a lab freezer.
GE scientists including Nobel Prize winner Irving Langmuir, Vincent Schaefer and Bernard Vonnegut studied the science of snow. Their experiments with weather control provided Bernard’s brother, Kurt, the inspiration to write Cat’s Cradle.
May 31st, 2013
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There are a number of references that might come to mind when looking at these gifs: Starry Night, a shaken snow globe, the atmosphere of another planet or, perhaps for those of a certain age, Biz Markie’s Vapors.
While these are all fine images to conjure up, the animations here all come from a film made around 1947 to show how scientists make snow in a lab. It was part of research called Project Cirrus that was undertaken by GE and the U.S. government to see if people could weaken the destructive power of hurricanes. Though the project failed, weather researchers learned much about tropical cyclones.
Click on the gifs for a brief description or watch the full video posted by the Museum of Innovation and Science.
May 23rd, 2013
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New Software Predicts Power Outages From Storms
Researchers have developed software to predict where blackouts are most likely to happen when storms hit, which could help authorities cut the amount of time people are in the dark after disasters like Hurricane Sandy.
Sandy wreaked havoc in 2012, causing as much as nearly $50 billion in damage, making it the second-costliest hurricane to hit the United States. At its peak, it left roughly 8.5 million people without power.
“As large storms increase in frequency and intensity in the United States and worldwide due to changing climate, getting profiles of where places are vulnerable to damage and investing in infrastructure to eliminate those vulnerabilities is integral to maintaining a well-operating power grid,” says Steven Fernandez, a national security issues researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
May 16th, 2013
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New View of Mysterious Hurricane at Saturn’s North Pole
NASA has released a new video showing the giant hurricane spinning inside the strange hexagonal shape at Saturn’s north pole.
The agency says the storm’s eye is 1,250 miles wide, about 20 times the average eye size of Earth’s hurricanes. Its outer clouds are traveling at 330 mph. The stationary hexagonal wave shape, which could fit two Earths side by side, has been experimentally shown to be caused by a gradient in wind speeds at different latitudes on the planet. The image above and the video were captured by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.
Click through to see a close-up of the hurricane.
April 29th, 2013
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