Meteors and meteorologists

The previous blog post showed some pretty amazing dashcam video of a meteor moving through Earth's atmosphere a few days ago. We showed the same video on tonight's 6pm newscast. Jeannie let me know she was going to show it so we could think of a segue into weather, and I commented that I am a meteorologist, after all. Now, you may be wondering why we're called meteorologists if we don't study things in space - just weather. How come we're not called weatherologists or something?

We can thank good ol' Aristotle. The famous Greek philosopher came up with it way back in 340 B.C. when he wrote Meteorologica. It included not just weather, but everything up in the sky - including meteors, the stars, and so on. To the Greeks, anything that was up in the sky or fell from it was called a meteor, so it's not surprising that Aristotle lumped them all together as well.

As time went on, the study of things within our atmosphere and the study of things outside our atmosphere branched apart, but we can thank Aristotle for being the individual who got the ball rolling many centuries ago.

As an aside, we still "do as the Greeks do" - pardon the alteration of the phrase. The technical name for a snowflake, raindrop, etc. is "hydrometeor." Rainbows and other optical phenomena are called photometeors. And lightning and the like are electrometeors.

We have frozen hydrometeors in our forecast for Sunday night into early Monday. I'll have more details tomorrow, but as it stands now, I fully expect to see most folks to get at least an inch of snow.