Results tagged “theearth”

This morning's golf weather tip from weather.com, for reasons unknown to Gothamist they think we are a golf fanatic, is: Watch for wet turf. We didn't see any turf, let alone wet turf, but we did get drenched on our crosstown walk this morning. Two-and-a-half inches of rain have fallen since last night. Half of that rain in just the past few hours. The rain, easterly winds, and rapidly melting snow across the region have led to numerous incidents of urban and small stream flooding, in turn leading to many traffic and transit delays.

The rain is gone and the warmth is soon to follow. Last night's storm, which produced quite a bit of flooding upstate, was our last significant chance for precipitation for a while. Cooler air is arriving as our weather is being dominated by a large high pressure system. Tomorrow may squeeze in warmer than normal temperatures, for the twelfth consecutive day, but after that we're looking at high temperatures in the upper-40s to lower-50s for the next week.

Really, we shouldn't be talking about heat in January but we're in the midst of another stretch of unusually warm weather. Temperatures were 15 degrees above normal over the weekend and at least that much again today (It's already 60 degrees at JFK!). If Gothamist has done our math correctly we will easily be the fourth warmest January on record and may squeeze by 1950 and 1990 to finish in second place. At two degrees warmer than any other January, 1932 will hold on to the top spot in the rankings. Rain moves in tonight and tomorrow looks soggy. It will be a little cooler but still well above average for the rest of the week. Can winter continue this warm? Only Staten Island Chuck knows for sure.

The Earth was at aphelion yesterday. Aphelion is the greatest distance the Earth gets from the Sun. From now until January 2nd, when perihelion occurs, we'll be getting a little bit closer to the Sun every day. Like the rings of dust that circle Saturn the Earth's orbit is not perfectly circular. Instead we have a slightly eccentric orbit. Gothamist and the rest of the Earth were 152.6 million km away from the Sun yesterday and will be 147.5 million km away come January. Since we are slightly farther from the Sun in July, the Earth receives a little less sunlight than in January.

Here's what New York looks like from space this morning. Satellite instruments that observe the weather are nothing more than very sophisticated, very expensive digital cameras. The images we normally see on television come from the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, or GOES. GOES is positioned 22,300 miles (35,800 km) above the equator. At that distance the satellite is in a geosynchronous orbit --it stays above the same spot on the Earth. The National Weather Service has two operational GOES satellites in orbit: GOES-East over the western Atlantic and GOES-West over the eastern Pacific.