Drought In Europe Brings Near-Historic Lake Levels – National Weather Outlook For August 14, 2022

National Weather Forecast

Scattered areas of showers and storms will be possible across portions of the lower 48 on Sunday. These areas include parts of southern Texas due to a weak area of low pressure moving in from the Gulf of Mexico, a system moving through the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley, and a system in the Northern Plains.

The heaviest rain through Monday will be across southern Texas due to that weak area of low pressure throughout the weekend into early in the week. Up to at least 5” could fall in some of these areas.

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Italy’s Lake Garda shrinks to near-historic low amid drought

More from the Star Tribune: “Italy’s worst drought in decades has reduced Lake Garda, the country’s largest lake, to near its lowest level ever recorded, exposing swaths of previously underwater rocks and warming the water to temperatures that approach the average in the Caribbean Sea. Tourists flocking to the popular northern lake Friday for the start of Italy’s key summer long weekend found a vastly different landscape than in past years. An expansive stretch of bleached rock extended far from the normal shoreline, ringing the southern Sirmione Peninsula with a yellow halo between the green hues of the water and the trees on the shore.”

This new innovation boosts wind farm energy output yet costs nothing

More from Electrek: “Scientists have come up with a way to make wind farms more energy efficient, and it doesn’t require new investment. Wind turbines are controlled as freestanding units and only maximize their own power production, but the wake of each wind turbine impacts each other. … Howland led a team of scientists supported by MIT and Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy who published a new study yesterday in the journal Nature Energy. The researchers found – based on real-world tests at a utility-scale wind farm in India – that a wind farm’s energy output can be increased if individual turbines are optimized and the wind flow is modeled collectively.”

One more clue to the Moon’s origin

More from ETH Zurich: “Humankind has maintained an enduring fascination with the Moon. It was not until Galileo’s time, however, that scientists really began study it. Over the course of nearly five centuries, researchers put forward numerous, much debated theories as to how the Moon was formed. Now, geochemists, cosmochemists, and petrologists at ETH Zurich shed new light on the Moon’s origin story. In a study just published in the journal, Science Advances, the research team reports findings that show that the Moon inherited the indigenous noble gases of helium and neon from Earth’s mantle. The discovery adds to the already strong constraints on the currently favoured “Giant Impact” theory that hypothesizes the Moon was formed by a massive collision between Earth and another celestial body.”

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– D.J. Kayser