Meteorology vs Space Weather
A conversation with our 10 year old today:
"Ma? Why is the study of weather meteorology? They're not studying meteors."
Ah, but they both have to do with the atmosphere. Meteorology is the study of weather inside Earth's atmosphere. A meteor enters Earth's atmosphere and crashes.
"So why didn't they name it atmospheric studies?"
Eh, it's one of those funny old Greek words. Aristotle gave it the name Meteorology and it stuck. Technically meteorology falls within atmospheric studies. Meterorlogists only study the lower atmosphere. Aeronomy studies the upper atmosphere.
NOAA stands for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) . They're a parent to the U.S. National Weather Service (NWS) . Here's a link to their kids weather page. They have some fun educational materials there.
Meteorologists used to study meteors, but that shifted over to Astronomy a long time ago.
"Wait. You specified that meteorology only covers weather IN-side our Earth's atmosphere. Is there weather OUT-side of Earth's atmosphere?"
Yes. It's called Space Weather. It includes things like solar flares, electromagnetic storms, and coronal mass ejections.
Here's more info on space weather from NASA, written for kids:
Meteorology is the study of weather in the 🌎 Earth's inner atmosphere.
We can watch it from space, but it's different from Space Weather!
Related Blog Post
Are you curious about how plants weather wild weather? Here's a blog post about it.
We had this conversation on our drive to gymnastics. While we were at gymnastics, a big thunderstorm hit. There was a tornado warning, hail, lightning, and general chaos. The gymnasts retreated to the storm shelter to draw pictures and play games during the worst of the storm. Here is our 10 year old's drawing. She says the sun is worried about the weather.
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