Atmospheric Optics « WJAC-TV Weather Blog

Aurora Borealis – Incredible Lights in the Sky

By Tim Tender on August 4th, 2010 at 11:13 AM

I’ve always been amazed by the aurora borealis and have always wanted to see one personally. I never have but this video from telegraph.co.uk does a pretty darn good job at capturing them.

Just press play below to see them.

According to the website…

On 1 August, almost the entire side of the Sun that faces the Earth erupted in a blaze of activity known as a “coronal mass ejection”.

Dramatic auroras were seen in Denmark, Norway, Greenland, Germany and across the northern United States and Canada yesterday, as the expanding bubble of gas slammed into the Earth’s atmosphere.

(Read More)

1,000 Posts Later

By Tim Tender on June 27th, 2010 at 8:44 PM

It’s hard to beleive that we’ve posted 1,000 stories on the weather blog. We started with a page on the main WJACTV.com website. That didn’t have enough adaptability, so we moved to Blogger and later to WordPress. We’ve been on WordPress for a while now.

This is officially our 1,000th post according to the stats system that we use. I have a feeling that we hit 1,000 a while ago, but this is a great opportunity to look back and see some of the cooler topics we’ve talked about over the last 3 years.

Below the jump is a list of 13 categories with some of the cooler topics. You can click on the category to go to a list of the posts about that topic. Click in for the list. (Read More)

A Sky of Many Colors

By WJAC Weather on April 14th, 2009 at 2:45 PM

Some of us have heard about the ‘red sky’ sayings.� There are two that readily come to mind… “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight” and “Red sky in the morning, sailor’s warning.”

Our friends at WTOV in Steubenville have taken a look at these sayings and have analyzed them from a meteorological standpoint.� Check [...]

Many Shades of Blue

By WJAC Weather on March 23rd, 2009 at 1:34 PM

Today was a lazy day in the Severe Weather Center. It was full of housekeeping and getting things back to organized after a chaotic couple of weeks (or months).

It was such a nice day outside, that I decided to go back to a question I posed a couple of years ago. I wondered if the term ‘cobalt blue sky’ was actually correct.

To figure this out, I took a picture of the sky and loaded it into my computer. From there, I went to Wikipedia and searched for the different shades of blue. I copied each colored block onto the picture of the sky to compare. Click into the post to see the picture and what shades of blue best match the sky…

(Read More)

Ring Around the Sun

By WJAC Weather on May 5th, 2008 at 12:36 PM

It’s such a beautiful day today with lots of sunshine and temperatures getting into the 60s across the Alleghenies.� We do, however, have some high, thin cirrus clouds working in.� These clouds, because they are so high in the sky, are made of ice crystals.

We got a call this afternoon from a viewer [...]