justira

Hey it's a post from that ridiculous/amazing/this is the worst idea/this is the best idea Make-Your-Own Meme "blog every day of November" thing! Original post/list of topics. Feel free to add more: LJ | DW — anon and openID welcome!

lassarina: your favourite kind of weather, and why (here)


Which is actually an AWESOME question for me because I LOVE weather? I mean, yeah, let's get it out of the way: if I have shit to do and just want to get it done quickly and in comfort, I like the weather outside to be a nice, 75-degree, not-dry, not-humid, not-too-sunny (I actually hate extreme sunshine) day. Whatever. Let's move on to the INTERESTING stuff!

I love weather, including EXPERIENCING weather, because it feels and looks AMAZING. It is so HUGE and just— so BEYOND us. Basically: weather is awesome.

And I do mean it when I say I like experiencing weather — I actually enjoy biking in the rain for example and think it's pretty neat (the only not-neat part is that if you do this in a city then you smell like road juice afterward :( ). Especially now, cause living in Portland, OR for my college years inured me to rain: what EVER.

But anyway. My favourite kinds of weather to experience are probably a good summer storm or a nice, dense fog.

The summer storms I mean are the kind where the air stays warm but not cloying and huge fat drops fall from the sky and it is somehow magically SUNNY even though it is effing storming? Those are the BEST THING EVER to be in; it is like having a damn waterpark happening ON YOU. It freaking ROCKS.

And fog! Fog is just BEAUTIFUL. My favourite kind is the kind that lies dense and white in the hollows and meadows and parks: it looks like being above the clouds, and it's just so lovely and peaceful-looking. I do also really like being inside the fog itself; it's ethereal and I enjoy the sense of mystery and disorientation it gives and I especially enjoy how it plays with sound. I love fog at night especially — I remember in college walking home from the library to my dorm (or later even the short trip to my car) and the fog being so thick on campus I couldn't see where I was going: it was scary and unnerving and gorgeous and did I mention scary and I freaking loved it >.>

So that is weather I actually like to experience! Now let's have some linkspam! Weather that I have never experienced but think is cool and/or DO NOT WANT TO EVER EXPERIENCE but also think is cool. Obligatory thing about northern lights/aurora borealis being really cool (IT IS), and everyone knows about tornadoes and hurricanes, which are indeed amazing and super serious business and just like wow, I do not want to screw with that. Instead I will talk about some OTEHR weather stuff!

First, some clouds! CLOUDS ARE REALLY COOL YOU GUYS, OKAY? THEY ARE I SWEAR! Some cloud stuff that is really awesome: noctilucent clouds, fire rainbows, and mammatus clouds. I actually don't find the pictures on the wiki for the latter very impressive, so please also/instead look at the ones over here! That also includes pictures of WALL CLOUDS, which are amazing! Note: google image search on all of the above IS YOUR FRIEND FOR LIFE.

See? Clouds are TOTALLY NOT BORING.

I also think downbursts are really neat. We had one in my region this year, actually, and I was GLUED to the window in fascination for a long time. Here is a video of a downburst!

( embed behind the cut! )

That is like, WOW, right?

Also cool is ball lightning, which I WISH I had video of :(

And this may not strictly count as weather, but maelstroms are also really, really awesome. Let's have another video! This is of the Saltstraumen maelstrom, the world's strongest tidal currents. I especially like the upwelling currents visible in the latter half of the video.

( more embed! )

But this is mere EARTH WEATHER! Earth weather is PUNY FLAILINGS compared to the might of SPACE WEATHER!

So there is this thing called the solar wind (HOW COOL IS THAT? and that's not even the COOL thing here!) and every once in a while you get this HUGE burst of solar wind that basically flings tons of SUN CHUNKS, RADIATION, and MAGNETIC FIELDS into SPACE. SOMETIMES AT EARTH. Where they cause GEOMAGENTIC STORMS (ALSO COOL, come ON, storms MADE OUT OF MAGENTIC FIELDS). This is a coronal mass ejection, or CME.

Basically? THE SUN IS EXPLODING AT US.

CMEs travel at an average speed of about 500km/SECOND (though some have reached 3,200km/s, WHAT THE FUCK) and they get PRETTY FREAKING HUGE. The wikipedia article on CMEs actually has a pretty decent animated picture of a nice, big one at the top: go watch it. Several times. Then please note that the sun? is NOT the size of the occluding disk in the middle. It's the size of the little white circle in the center. YEAH THAT'S RIGHT.

Now THIS is weather!

( In fact, let's have two more vids! )


HILARIOUSLY studying these things was my JOB during my last years of high school (literally, I was paid to build a program to help analyze pictures of CMEs). I have a general fascination with space stuff, though, waaaaay predating that job. If I had to name my favourite weather phenomenon on an absolute scale, and with a very loose definition of weather, then I would say black holes, which I could do an entire series of posts on and also I have a crippling fear of. In fact I have had a crippling fear of black holes ever since I was six years old. Yep.


So! How's the weather >.>