The Truth Behind Six Persistent Weather Myths, Part I
Interested in talking about the weather? Well, here are six cool weather myths that you should definitely avoid
Nowadays, very few of us really believe angry or playful gods cause the weather... but that still leaves a lot of room for creative weather myths. We happen to feel that it's our duty to dispel the cloud of foggy thinking surrounding such myths, so here are the facts behind six -- three for each part of this article.
Myth 1: Humidity contributes to the wind chill factor.
While it seems reasonable to think that part of the wind chill derives from the moisture in the air, the truth is that ambient humidity has little to do with the chill factor. In fact, in a recent recalculation of the wind chill formula by the National Weather Service, humidity even isn't included as one of the variables.
As it turns out, wind chill has more to do with temperature and wind speed than anything else. Another weather myth about wind chill is that it can cool inanimate objects below ambient temperature; it can't. Wind chill only measures how cold it feels; and since your car can't feel anything, 10º is 10º to it no matter what.
Myth 2: Scientifically speaking, ball lightning exists.
Not yet, though scientists are certainly working on the issue. The problem is that while there's plenty of anecdotal evidence for ball lightning, that doesn't cut any ice with Science or Nature. A scientist has to be able to describe and replicate an effect reliably before it's generally accepted, and that hasn't happened yet
For those of you who aren't sure what ball lightning is, it's exactly what it sounds like -- anomalous spheres of lightning that may or may not be generated in electrical events and thunderstorms. Maybe it's superheated plasma or odd interactions of electricity and magnetism. Maybe it's a weather myth.
The problem is that ball lightning is easily mistaken for known phenomena like St. Elmo's fire, rapid oxidation, and electrical arcs, though some report that it can hover, pass through solid objects, and explode with a loud bang. That seems to be something different than the above items -- but what, no one knows.
Myth 3: Raindrops are teardrop shaped.
Despite the best efforts of the people who do the graphics on the Weather Channel and elsewhere, this statement is just a weather myth. Small raindrops (less than 1 mm across) are spherical (baseball-shaped). As they get larger, they flatten out more and more, until they're basically flattened blobs.
Interestingly, raindrops bigger than 4.5 mm take on a kind of parachute shape just before breaking up into smaller drops of rain. These smaller drops can merge with each other as they fall, starting the process over again.
By the way, this is part of the reason most hailstones are round. They start out as spherical raindrops that freeze in midair and get blown back upward to collect more layers of ice, until they're the size of peas or golf balls or even baseballs.
See how one simple observation proves that this weather myth, among many weather myths, is all wet?
