Tornado Week on The Weather Channel

Today marks the start of The Weather Channel's yearly 'Tornado Week' – a 7-day program aimed at raising awareness and recapping the powerful force of one of the fiercest weather phenomenon.

From Storm Stories to Storm Riders, and from Weather Proof to When Weather Changed History, TWC will take you into the twister and bring you inspiring tales from survivors and rescuers battling amazing tornadic weather events.

Now for the awesomeness! This year in conjunction with 'Tornado Week' you can build your own tornado online! Into the Tornado, a virtual, physics-based tornado simulator, lets users get up close and personal with a tornado by allowing you to select the tornado's wind speed, size and objects they want to test. Using the simulator, drop in a hot rod, a locomotive or even a pig to see how a tornado impacts an assortment of objects. TWC says Into the Tornado is as close as you can get and as close as you want to be – in order to understand the science behind Mother Nature's most unpredictable and violent act.

'Tornado Week' runs April 4 – 10, and kicks off tonight at 8:00 p.m. ET with a new season of Storm Stories. Check it out!

Nor'easter Madness: Winter 2009 – 2010 Radar Rewind

This is one of the most AMAZING things I have EVER seen! This is pure Nor'easter Madness!

Check out this radar rewind, courtesy of AccuWeather.com. You will see 22 major storms that doused the northeast in a four month radar animation from December 1 through today.

* Note: This video is best viewed in Firefox, Chrome, Safari or any web browser other than Explorer (go figure) and it's totally worth launching those browsers if you have one of them, because this is just awesomeness!

Pollen Counts and Forecasts Explained

Spring is inevitably on its way, which means allergy season isn’t far behind. Fortunately for seasonal allergy sufferers, the awesomeness of science helps to provide some relief.

Pollen counts enable pollen forecasters to provide allergy sufferers an opportunity to mitigate their symptoms. A pollen count is a measurement of how much pollen is in the air. This count represents the concentration of all the pollen (or of one particular type, like ragweed) in the air in a certain area at a specific time. It is expressed in grains of pollen per cubic meter over a 24 hour period.

To do a pollen count, a pollen sample is taken using an air-sampling device. These samplers collect particles from the air onto a transparent, sticky surface. The sample is then examined under a microscope, where the pollen grains are counted and identified. Since pollen travels long distances through the air, this count is relevant to a large area, and a count from one sampling site is typically used as data for an entire city.

A pollen forecast is a prediction of what the pollen levels will be in the future, like a weather forecast. Pollen forecasting often has greater value for allergy suffers than a pollen count, because they can use this information to plan their day, including whether or not to take medication.

Pollen forecasting methods consider natural events, besides the recent pollen counts, that will affect future pollen levels. We consider historical pollen counts (which provide predominant pollen and seasonal trend information for a certain area) temperatures, precipitation, and weather forecasts.

Pollen forecasts are geographically specific down to the city. For the pollen forecast in your area, visit pollen.com.

Achoo!

The March Superstorm of 1993

What happens when a cold front plunges into the deep south while three strong jet streams merge along the Atlantic Seaboard? A Superstorm!!!

Today marks the anniversary of one of my favorite snow events I've lived through -- the March Superstorm of 1993. This epic winter weather event, also known as The White Hurricane or The Great Blizzard of 93, was unique for its intensity, massive size and wide-reaching effects.

Bringing with it three days of crippling snow, whirling seas, coastal flooding, blizzards, tornadoes and bone-chilling cold, the March Superstorm of 1993 was definitely a freak of nature. It all started on Friday, March 12 when a cluster of powerful thunderstorms formed in the northwestern Gulf of Mexico and then merged with a narrow band of snow and rain that was pushing in from the West Coast. The two storm systems collided with the jet stream causing this to happen...

The amount of snow and rain that fell during the storm was nothing short of incredible! Areas as far south as central Alabama and Georgia received 8 inches of snow and areas such as Birmingham, Alabama, received up to 16 inches. Even the Florida Panhandle reported up to 4 inches, with hurricane-force wind gusts and record low barometric pressures.

Between Louisiana and Cuba, hurricane-force winds produced high storm surges in the Gulf of Mexico, which along with scattered tornadoes killed dozens of people.

Northward up the Atlantic Seaboard and Appalachian Mountains, and extending all the way to the Canadian Maritimes, there was over 40 inches of snow and ice, absolutely crippling everything in its path.

This winter storm is the largest one-piece storm in recorded history!

Our Daily Routine!

This cartoon appeared this week in the New Yorker magazine. Spending the last couple months managing workload and the blog, especially during all the recent exciting wintry weather, this image pretty much depicts our daily routine!

Today marks two months The Northeast Quadrant has been online! Thanks for following, and stay tuned later this week for an exciting blog post recapping an interview we are doing with an Accuweather.com Forensic Meteorologist!

Awesomeness!

NASA Rocket Destroys Sundog

Last week when folks in The Northeast Quadrant were buried under snow, NASA launched another new mission. The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) lifted off from Cape Canaveral on a five-year mission to study the sun. SDO will beam back IMAX-quality images of solar explosions and peer beneath the stellar surface to see the sun's magnetic dynamo in action.

Shortly after launch, SDO's Atlas V rocket flew past a sundog hanging suspended in the blue Florida sky and with a rippling flurry of shock waves, destroyed it.

Sundogs are formed by plate-shaped ice crystals in high, cold cirrus clouds. As the crystals drift down from the sky like leaves fluttering from trees, aerodynamic forces tend to align their broad faces parallel to the ground. When sunlight hits a patch of well-aligned crystals at just the right distance from the sun a sundog can be seen.

When the rocket penetrated the cirrus, shock waves rippled through the cloud and destroyed the alignment of the crystals and the thus the sun dog too. The whole launch video is pretty cool, but for those of you who are impatient, the awesomeness occurs around 1:50 in the video.

New Giant Up to the Minute Weather Map

When you're not getting weather news from The Northeast Quadrant, you might want to check out this new no-frills site Full Screen Weather map brought to you by our friends over at Weather Underground.

Visit fullscreenweather.com and plug in your zip code and enjoy up-to-the-minute weather information in all its full screen glory. And like your favorite blog, The Northeast Quadrant, Full Screen Weather is brought to you ad free. More weather awesomeness for you!

Totally Awesome Winter Phenomenon -- Hair Ice

This is just awesomeness! Hair ice, also called silk frost, is a type of ice formation that looks like silk and seems to only appear on woody, barkless materials on the ground. The ice structures tend to grow out of the pores in the wood, sort of like hairs on the human head. It grows outward from the surface of the wood as super-cooled water emerges from it, freezes and adds to the hairs from the base. These amazing ice structures have been found in places like Germany, Canada, Switzerland and the Pacific Northwest in the United States.

Dr. James Carter is a professor in the Department of Geography-Geology at the University of Illinois has collected photos and other reports (dating back to 1884) of hair ice. He concludes that the fibrous ice crystals seem to be caused by the pore structure of certain woods, and only forms where the bark has been removed. Reportedly, the phenomenon is reproducible: if you find a piece of wood growing hair ice, you can warm it up, then re-freeze it, and it will grow hair ice again. These formations are likely attributable to diurnal temperature variation -- the difference between temperature variations from day to night.

Unconfirmed reports on the Internet state this also happens to dog poo in the Pacific Northwest. That’s kinda awesome too.