Summer is finally here and it came in with some unbelievably hot weather for our area. We aren’t used to 100°+ heat indexes. So, I thought it might be fun this week to look at a little weather trivia.
Did you know that you can tell the temperature by counting a cricket’s chirps? You might be curious how this works. Apparently, all you have to do is count the number of chirps you hear in 15 seconds and add 40. That should be the temperature outside. If you decide to try this, let me know if it works.
Dirt mixed with wind creates a dust storm called a black blizzard. If you haven’t read The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah, she describes this phenomenon in that book, which is about the Dust Bowl era. I’m from Wisconsin, so as I was reading it, I thought she was talking about a tornado. But it was a black blizzard, something I hope never to experience.
The coldest temperature ever recorded was -89.2°C. That is -128.56°F. Way too cold for my blood although I can remember some -60°F temperatures from my childhood. We just put on more clothes and went out in it anyway.
Mild autumn weather means bigger spiders in our homes. In my opinion, no spiders in my home is okay with me. I can deal with Charlotte in Charlotte’s Web, but other than that spiders freak me out.
A heatwave can make train tracks bend. That should be obvious to anyone. Things expand when they get hot. In 2003 a heatwave turned grapes to raisins before they were picked. Imagine that, seeing the California raisins on the vine.
In July 2001, rainfall in Kerala, India, was blood red. It didn’t just happen in the Bible.
Worms wriggle up from underground when a flood is coming, so they say. But they don’t just do it then. It doesn’t have to be flooding, just really wet outside and you won’t have to dig for your worms before you go fishing.
Wild fires can create tornados made from fire called fire whirls. On the other hand, you can have water spouts, rotating columns of air over water, that might cause sea creatures to rain down from the sky.
Animals seem to know things that people don’t. Some frogs will get noisier before it rains. It is also believed that cats and dogs can sense when tornados are coming. I think other animals can do that too.
How would you like to get hit by a raindrop the size of a housefly moving at 30 mph? It could happen. Cape Farewell in Greenland is the windiest place on Earth. A hurricane in Florida caused 900 captive pythons to escape. A whiteout or heavy snowfall can make you feel sick. That doesn’t surprise me as it can be very disorienting when you can’t see where you are going. I personally have experienced it in a dense fog also.
It appears that weather can be a strange and interesting thing.