Weather

According to the Highway Loss Data Institute, approximately 250,000 cars are damaged by hail every year in the U.S. alone. The average cost of repair comes in at just over US$3,100, so what’s a person to do to protect their vehicle when rain takes the form of ice sculpted golf balls? The obvious solution – airbag the car.  Read More

At CES Unveiled, we had the chance to sit down with Etón, a company that builds products for entertainment and safety that can rely on hand cranks or solar power to keep them running. In addition to the FRX series and the Rukus and Rukus Solar it was also spruiking at last year's show, the company is displaying its new ZoneGuard series alongside a couple of additions to its Rukus line and the new BoostSolar Mobile Charging Solution.  Read More

Zurich’s Micasa Lab, the team responsible for the iRock and Cocoon 1, has developed yet another off-the-wall concept with the Nebula 12. Like the art of Berndnaut Smilde, the Nebula 12 concept produces indoor clouds, but Micasa Lab has gone one step further by using meteorological data so that it provides a representation of the forecast weather.  Read More

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now sending back weather reports and radiation measurements. Using the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS) instrument built by Spain’s Centro de Astrobiologia (CAB), the nuclear-powered robot has been taking measurements of atmospheric pressure, temperature, wind speed and other factors to better understand the Martian environment in hopes of finding out whether life could still exist on the Red Planet.  Read More

Although there is as yet no official confirmation, it appears that the Space Shuttle Enterprise, recently moved to a permanent home in New York City, was damaged by Hurricane Sandy.  Read More

We're used to the thought of humans sweating to cool down, but what about buildings? Researchers at ETH Zurich have applied the biological cooling mechanism to the task of keeping a building cool, and in the process have hit upon a novel and inexpensive method of cooling houses which could prove useful for homes in both developed and emerging nations.  Read More

There’s only so much that we can learn about hurricanes by looking at them from the ground, or by observing them using distant satellites. Aircraft, on the other hand, give researchers an aerial view of the weather systems, while also allowing for direct measurements of variables such as temperature and humidity – the one catch is, would you want to be in a plane that was circling over a hurricane? Probably not. That’s one of the reasons why NASA is using Global Hawk UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) to study hurricanes off the east coast of the U.S.  Read More

There is no shortage of smartphone apps that compile information from official weather monitoring sources, but if you’re looking to get some info on conditions closer to home – or inside it – then the Urban Weather Station from Netatmo could fit the bill. Designed specifically for iOS devices, (but also supporting Android devices), the cylindrical units monitor a range of environmental elements inside and out. Netatmo also hopes to use the Wi-Fi-connected devices to create “the largest weather and air quality monitoring network ever established.”  Read More

A high-resolution Doppler radar has the ability to detect individual hydrometeors, such as atmospheric raindrops, over 0.5 mm in diameter research led by the Naval Research Laboratory has revealed. The discovery should further understanding of the structure and behavior of clouds, and could lead to more accurate forecasting of severe weather.  Read More