Weather
Tropical Storm Fred
Not much rain from it locally, but lots of gray skies.
Another cloudy Saturday 🌥
Aqua satellite taken shows how clouds prevailed on Saturday August 7, 2021.
Lightning Strike Melted This Ford Super Duty’s Interior | The Drive
In case you've never seen a car get hit by lightning, it's pretty violent. I doubt there's any such thing as a gentle lightning strike, but when there are lots of electrical systems and metal involved, it only gets more dramatic. The aftermath of such an incident is rarely seen, but we've got exactly that with pictures of this toasty Ford Super Duty.
From the outside, it just looks like a cracked windshield; really, though, it's way more. A view from the driver's seat shows a blackened and melted mess with that same windshield severely scorched. Luckily, as the original poster Eric Wilkinson explained to The Drive, the truck was unoccupied when it happened.
Pacific Northwest bakes under once-in-a-millennium heat dome – CBS News
The heat wave baking the U.S. Pacific Northwest and British Columbia, Canada, is of an intensity never recorded by modern humans. By one measure it is more rare than a once in a 1,000 year event — which means that if you could live in this particular spot for 1,000 years, you'd likely only experience a heat dome like this once, if ever.
This article shows that the reporters at CBS News don't understand how probability works.
A millennium heat wave, has only a 63.2% chance of happening in 1,000 years. It also has a 1 in 1,000 chance of happening any specific year, or 0.1% probability in any specific year. That doesn't mean it's impossible to happen any one year, or that two years consecutively of millennium heat waves doesn't mean the probability is wrong.
People often think when you flip a coin that each time you should get a head then a tail then a head, but if that rarely that happens. 50% probability only happens after many coin flips, possibly hundreds. The best way to show somebody isn't faking a coin toss is to look for long runs of heads or tails, because that's most common to happen with probability.
What is the heat index?
"It's not the heat, it's the humidity". That's a partly valid phrase you may have heard in the summer, but it's actually both. The heat index, also known as the apparent temperature, is what the temperature feels like to the human body when relative humidity is combined with the air temperature. This has important considerations for the human body's comfort. When the body gets too hot, it begins to perspire or sweat to cool itself off. If the perspiration is not able to evaporate, the body cannot regulate its temperature. Evaporation is a cooling process. When perspiration is evaporated off the body, it effectively reduces the body's temperature. When the atmospheric moisture content (i.e. relative humidity) is high, the rate of evaporation from the body decreases. In other words, the human body feels warmer in humid conditions. The opposite is true when the relative humidity decreases because the rate of perspiration increases. The body actually feels cooler in arid conditions. There is direct relationship between the air temperature and relative humidity and the heat index, meaning as the air temperature and relative humidity increase (decrease), the heat index increases (decreases).
NWS Radar
radar.weather.gov is a very mobile friendly and good site to keep bookmarked anytime you plan to go outside and have cell service.