So far, the weather this spring has brought us all sorts of dashed hopes, with warm, “normal” days immediately followed by chilly, windy, rainy weeks. Whereas the beginning of this week had many stripping off their winter layers and getting out of the house to enjoy temperatures above 60 and sunshine, the end of the [...]

This week you’ll want to be sure you check out: Reporting live from Rome, Katy Myers discusses some of the challenges with excavating inside urn—and what constitutes a person—at Bones Don’t Lie. At Inkfish, Elizabeth Preston makes a connection between naming practices and popular words—like violent weather systems. At Evoanth, Adam Benton delves into what [...]

Featured this week in my ResearchBlogging.org column: At Powered by Osteons, Kristina Killgrove has a fantastic seasonal post up on the symbolism of eggs and their role in burials. At Gambler’s House, teofilo clears up usage of the word “flimsy” in the context of Mississippian houses by highlighting an interesting bias that the word contributes. [...]

For two days Hurricane Irene pounded the coast of the Eastern United States. Though she was ultimately downgraded to a tropical storm, the damage from flooding and downed branches left no doubt as to the power she commanded: washed out roads and rail lines, flooded homes, and widespread power failures left millions trying to pick [...]

This week’s blackouts in India have been blamed at least in part on the lack of rain during the annual monsoon season, which hindered hydropower production and increased the demand for electricity for use in agricultural irrigation. But the unusually dry year has also had at least one positive effect: it has helped to boost [...]

As another hurricane season passes, I’m disappointed I didn’t hear Bill Gates resound with last year’s grand (yet perhaps logistically impossible) idea to dump tons of cold water in the path of moving twisters like Karl, Danielle, Lisa, and Tomas. Maybe Steve Jobs is plotting a more hip idea for 2011… Despite a tech mogul’s [...]

The last time the Earth enjoyed greenhouse gas levels like those of today was roughly 4 million years ago, during an era known as the Pliocene. The extra heat of average temperatures as much as 4 degrees Celsius warmer turned the tropical oceans into a nice warm pool of bathwater, as noted by new research [...]

Just as regions of our planet have monsoon season, or tornado season, so too does Saturn have its own stormy season. Once every Saturn year or so—which corresponds to roughly 30 Earth years—a giant, churning storm works its way through the clouds of Saturn’s northern hemisphere, sometimes encircling the entire planet like a belt. Lasting [...]

UCAR president Thomas Bogdan leads the movement to form a U.S. Weather Commission. Photo by Carlye Calvin Despite the ever-present caveat that predicting the weather is a difficult and inexact science, it seems that forecasts have been getting better and better. Yet some leaders in meteorology say continued improvement is not guaranteed and could even [...]

Welcome to Scientific American‘s Science of Sandy live blog where we are posting continuous updates on the storm and its aftermath, and answering your questions. If you have pictures, video, audio or questions about this tropical cyclone (categorized as a hurricane and a tropical storm at various times in its progress)—share them with us at sciamsandy@gmail.com, [...]

Hot weather is more than uncomfortable; it’s a killer. In fact, heat is the number one weather-related cause of death in the U.S. In an average year, heat kills more people than floods, hurricanes, lightning and tornadoes combined, according to the National Weather Service. And this year is going to get hotter than normal. “Most [...]

Soot may be responsible for the tropics expanding north, according to an analysis involving multiple computer models of the climate. By absorbing sunlight and trapping extra heat in the atmosphere, the tiny, black particles may be helping the poleward march of tropical conditions. The research will be published in Nature on May 17. (Scientific American [...]

The winter of 2010–2011 has been a good one for sledding and snowball fights, as snowstorms have dusted the U.S. from Georgia to New England to the Pacific Northwest. And Tuesday is no exception, with snowstorms forecast for much of the northern U.S. But good news for snow lovers is not always good news for [...]

Short answer? Not much. In fact, while no single storm is anything more than weather, stronger winter storms are exactly what climate scientists expect from a warming climate. How can that be? Simple. Warmer air allows for more water vapor, the key constituent of snow (which accords with the folk wisdom from my home state, [...]

SAN FRANCISCO—The first 30 pixels of information ever recorded of a lightning bolt in the x-ray spectrum was presented as a video December 14 here at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.   Despite being a common weather occurrence, lightning is still poorly understood as a natural phenomenon. Scientists are not sure what triggers [...]

With Europe’s airport staffers scrambling to send tens of thousands of flights into the air to make up for a week’s worth of halted traffic and stranded travelers thanks to Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano, researchers at the U.K.’s University of Reading are taking the first direct measurements of the ash plume parked over Scotland. The researchers [...]

Today’s suggestion? Get used to it. Days of unspeakable heat? The heat taking the usual storm systems and turning them excessively violent? Lack of investment in infrastructure making recovery from those storms lengthy and piecemeal? Check, check, and check. Remember the “Snowstorm of 88” narratives we all grew up listening to? The next generation of [...]

Throughout Sandy, I was cooped up in my apartment in northern Manhattan with my son Benjamin, who was studying for a medical school exam on the cranial nerves. I drilled him through endless lists, ocularmotor nerve (cranial III),  hypoglossal (cranial XII), and so on. Then he volunteered a medical factoid that I had never heard [...]

July was the hottest month ever recorded in Washington, D.C., in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and in Wichita Falls, Texas, as measured by the National Weather Service. In fact, the NWS has issued an “excessive heat warning” for a huge swath of middle America extending from northwestern Illinois and central Iowa in the north to central [...]