For novice hurricane hunters and seasoned forecasters alike, it’s a year of cyclones, twisters, blizzards, heat waves, and the science behind the world’s most mysterious weather phenomena.
Extreme Events: Consider the basketball-size hailstone that fell into a small town in Argentina, or Canada’s coldest day, when an astonishing -81 F temperature caused sound waves to bend.
Extreme Places: Al the mouth of the Catatumbo River in Venezuela, lightning is known to strike every 1 to 2 seconds. Literally.
Plus, discover weather’s role in mythology, fascinating trivia, and terms such as “St. Elmo’s fire”-a blue-violet plasma that emanates from pointy objects during thunderstorms.
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Dr. Daniel Swain is a climate scientist in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles, and holds concurrent appointments as a Research Fellow in the Capacity Center for Climate and Weather Extremes at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and as the California Climate Fellow at The Nature Conservancy of California. He holds a PhD in Earth System Science from Stanford University and a B.S. in Atmospheric Science from the University of California, Davis.
