An easier way to simulate cloud cover

July 19, 2018

Take a look at the clouds, if there are any in your sky right now. If not, here are a few examples. Watch the billows, the white lofty tufts set against the blue sky. Or, depending on your weather, watch the soft grey edges smear together into blended tones that drag down through the air […]



Arctic clouds highly sensitive to air pollution

January 3, 2018

In 1870, explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, trekking across the barren and remote ice cap of Greenland, saw something most people wouldn’t expect in such an empty, inhospitable landscape: haze. Nordenskiöld’s record of the haze was among the first evidence that air pollution around the northern hemisphere can travel toward the pole and degrade air quality […]



How the shape of Lake Ontario generates local, persistent snowstorms

November 10, 2017

A six-foot-wide snowblower mounted on a tractor makes a lot of sense when you live on the Tug Hill plateau. Tug Hill, in upstate New York, is one of the snowiest places in the eastern U.S. and experiences some of the most intense snowstorms in the world.  This largely rural region, just east of Lake […]