snow

Blogging on EARTH

Actually, this is a meta-blog: A blog about a blog.

Not had enough of the snow yet?

Over the last week, I’ve heard a lot of people say, “If global warming is real, why is it still snowing in Washington, D.C.?”

Well, I have a response: It’s weather, not climate.

On Dec. 18, 2009, a winter storm deposited two feet of snow in a swath from the North Carolina mountains to Baltimore, Md., shutting down airports for days. Eight days later, a Christmas blizzard ripped through the Midwest, stranding holiday travelers in Nebraska and the Dakotas under almost a foot of snow. But which storm was worse? It’s a difficult call to make, because unlike other natural disasters, snowstorms have no categorization system. But researchers at NOAA are changing that: They are creating a unique ranking system to show how winter storms impact society.

SAN FRANCISCO — Colorado skiers have long suspected that snowfall is fluffiest when winds blow salt and dust eastward from the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Now that wisdom is confirmed by science.

After measuring cloud particles from plane flights over Colorado, atmospheric chemist Kim Prather of Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla and colleagues determined that nascent snow largely formed as a result of suspended Utah salt.

In order for snow and rain droplets to form, water needs a particle base on which to accumulate. This process is called nucleation.

EARTH’s Carolyn Gramling is in Vienna, Austria, at the European Geophysical Union meeting this week. Here are a few more sessions that she has found interesting (for more from the meeting, see her first “Dispatches”).