How About A Litte Gustnado On Your Skew-T

By Margaret Lyons in News on Oct 22, 2004 4:20PM

It's no secret that we love Ask Tom Why. Because sometimes it's easier to write a letter to a team of meteorologists and wait for an answer to be printed in the newspaper than just to google it. Oooh, information supahighway.

Today, Andy S. in Lake Bluff, Illinois wonders what a blizzard is because his bitchass coworker says blizzards, by definition, produce 8 inches of snow in 24 hours. Oh, blizzards. Right. That's going to happen pretty soon, isn't it. Gah. Anyway, Andy, your coworker owes you a beer and a lap dance: a blizzard is

A severe weather condition characterized by low temperatures, winds 35 mph or greater, and sufficient falling and/or blowing snow in the air to frequently reduce visibility to 1/4 mile or less for a duration of at least 3 hours. A severe blizzard is characterized by temperatures near or below 10°F, winds exceeding 45 mph, and visibility reduced by snow to near zero.

We didn't even have to Ask Tom—we just typed what is a blizzard right into the G. We didn't even need a question mark! Ah, techmology. Thanks, weather.com glossary for that tidbit. Also, thanks Weatherquestions.com for being exactly what your name suggests.

But what can we say, we're weather nerds, (and yes, we do prefer meteorology nerds), and we couldn't settle for just one definition. Why, what's…Buys Ballot's Law? It's the law that states in the Northern Hemisphere, if your back is to the wind, then the pressure on your left is lower than the pressure on your right. Mr. Ballot derived that empirically.

What about…a gustnado? Take a second and whisper that to yourself—that word just feels good in your mouth. Gustnado. That's a "weak, and usually short-lived tornado"—which is a "violently rotating column of air in contact with and extending between a convective cloud and the surface of the earth"—that comes at the windy beginning of a thunderstorm.

How about a skew-t log-p diagram? Why, that's a thermodynamic diagram developed by the U.S. Air force with temperature and the logarithm of pressure as axes. We like this one. It's all our favorite things combined—weather, graphs, and math! Too bad there's no Ask Tom Why about that bad boy.