GreenWatch: Sunday Morning Television shows some of our recent turbulent weather

The last two weeks have brought some downright interesting weather and wilderness events to the Outer Harbor waterfront this past week.  We witnessed some significant weather patterns including a couple days of waterspouts moving over the lake and clearly visible from Buffalo. These patterns were associated with fronts bringing high winds, rain, hail, and changing temperatures, and a Lake seiche which brought high water to this end of lake Erie. These dramatic weather events characterize living in Buffalo, at the edge of the water wilderness that is the Great Lakes. Today’s Sunday video brings you some images from those storms, from the harbor and the Bell Slip. Check out todays Sunday Morning Public Television:  Click here to view.

Midweek there was an unusual November warming trend, bringing temperatures to the mid 70’s and sunshine. There was also a relatively rare to our region visible Aurora Borealis due to increased solar activity. If you live in Niagara County or east, on the dark sky shores of Lake Ontario, you may have seen them. 

These cosmic events characterize where we live as on the edge of a space wilderness that is teaming with storms.  11 miles from where you are, straight up, is the gateway to the space wilderness- the edge of the Troposphere. The dancing Aurora’s are about 200-300 miles further up, but are massive and clearly visible from the earth’s surface in good weather.

 Our thin atmosphere extends to about 800 miles where the transition to the Exosphere and space begins. 93 million miles away is the Sun, the source of much of the space storm activity that has been rocking our world for a few weeks. Beyond that, this week there is a report that indications of a parallel universe have been revealed by the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.

Turns out that Geneva based CERN, birthplace of the internet, home to Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP), and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) , which in 2012 confirmed the Higgs Boson aka “The God Particle” is now deep into a project called Gravity’s Rainbow. Gravitiy’s Rainbow is exploring the parallel universe evidence. The Large Hadron Collider is being powered up this week for the first time in two years. That is this weeks science report.

Our Teeming Waterfront

On this past Wednesday night the Buffalo waterfront was crowded with 10,000 Connecting Terminal Light show celebrators witnessing the kick off to the “anything but dark sky on the Buffalo Outer Harbor campaign.” There is a 100% chance that not one of them was able to see the aurora through the Vegaz haze.

However, to be sure, public art is a great thing. Buffalo is graced with some spectacular public art and world class artists. This week some of our talented citizens celebrated with another kind of cosmic Thriller dance.

More good news. There is a wonderful meteor shower this week and next called the Taurids  which will peek November 12.  More Taurids here. You can see these nature shows for free. Just look up.  If you cant see the stars for the haze think about this:

International Dark Sky Association http://darksky.org

Sunday Morning Television is brought to you by GreenWatch, The Public, and the Friends of Times Beach Nature Preserve.  Sunday Morning Television videos produced and photographed by Jay Burney. 

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See our archive of Sunday Morning Videos. 

The Friends of Times Beach Nature Preserve is a Buffalo based organization dedicated to preserving and educating about critical habitat and species in the Great Lakes and at the downtown shoreline Buffalo preserve.