Fueled by copious moisture from a warm Gulf of Mexico, the slow-moving Imelda’s torrential rains and flooding wreaked havoc over a wide region. Two weeks later the remnants of Tropical Storm Imelda swamped parts of Texas under more than 40 inches (102 centimeters) of rain, enough to make it the fifth wettest recorded tropical cyclone to strike the lower 48 states. Each square pixel represents the measurements from a 10-by-10-mile (16-by-16-kilometer) area. Blues and greens show warmer areas with less rain clouds, while oranges and reds represent mostly cloud-free air. Purple shades denote the coldest cloud top temperatures and most severe convective activity. Hurricanes are large collections of severe, deep thunderstorms. In the process, Dorian tied an 84-year-old record for strongest landfalling Atlantic hurricane and became the fifth most intense recorded Atlantic hurricane to make landfall, as measured by its barometric pressure.Ī false-color infrared image of Hurricane Dorian, as seen by the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite at 2 p.m. In just five days, Dorian grew from a minimal Category 1 hurricane to a Category 5 behemoth, reaching a peak intensity of 185 miles (295 kilometers) per hour when it made landfall in The Bahamas. A look at the 2019 Atlantic hurricane season provides a case in point.Īfter a quiet start to the 2019 season, Hurricane Dorian roared through the Atlantic in late August and early September, surprising many forecasters with its unexpected and rapid intensification. A hot topic in extreme weather research is how climate change is impacting the strength of tropical cyclones. Are Supercharged Atlantic Hurricane Seasons a Case in Point? And just as it’s difficult to quantify how much of that athlete’s performance improvement is due to steroid use, so too it’s difficult to say whether extreme weather events are definitively due to a warmer atmosphere. Adding fossil fuel emissions to Earth’s atmosphere increases its temperature, which adds more energy to the atmosphere, supercharging it like an athlete on steroids. But great progress is being made as more studies are conducted.”Ī simple analogy describes how difficult it is to attribute extreme weather to climate change. In addition, representing small-scale processes of the atmosphere that are key to extreme weather events in climate models, such as turbulence, convection and cloud physics, is notoriously difficult. In contrast, satellites typically measure climate variables (such as precipitation, temperature and humidity) indirectly and don’t yet have long enough data records to establish trends, though that’s beginning to change. “Rain gauges, for example, provide good measurements, but they’re local and spread far apart. “All our available tools have pros and cons,” says Teixeira. Quantifying those interconnections is a big challenge. Evidence from satellites, aircraft, ground measurements and climate model projections are increasingly drawing connections. While their legendary find might go down in thrift shop history, it'll never top the time a guy found a cooler full of weed at his local Goodwill.While there’s not yet a full consensus on the matter, in recent years a body of evidence linking extreme weather with climate change has begun to emerge. Though it's sort of a bummer the Salvation Army didn't realize what a treasure it had, it's almost as if the space gods sought the duo out, seeing as Ashworth studies aerospace engineering and Rappa, astrophysics, at the University of Central Florida.Īs Neil Armstrong's old bag of moon dust proved, space junk can be worth a whole lot of money, and the two plan on auctioning off the suits at the American Space Museum in November to help pay for their tuition. Some of the suits reportedly belonged to astronauts George Nelson, Robert Parker, Owen Garriot, and Charles Walker, who jetted up through the atmosphere in the 80s. ![]() "We laid them out on the cart and just looked at them, and just-jaw dropped." "Who knows how long they'd been there," Rappa told WKMG. The museum estimates each space suit could fetch roughly $5,000 at auction. The pair managed to get a few experts at the American Space Museum to examine the suits, and learned they were the real deal-five blue jumpsuits had been worn by astronauts on missions to space, and the white one belonged to a member of the ground crew. They snapped up the six suits for 20 cents a pop and headed home with their booty.
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